Linda Stevens has compiled an article titled “GIS and Geospatial 2025: A Year in Review”, listing highlights and lowlights of our industry throughout this year.
The list includes these highlights:
- Mainstreaming of geospatial AI and automation
- Huge growth in open data and open tools
- Cloud and “geo-as-infrastructure” maturity
- More visible impact on climate and crises
- Professionalization and specialization of the workforce
… and these lowlights:
- Platform enshittification1 and vendor lock‑in pressure
- GIS Became more Expensive
- Enterprise is King
- Ethics, surveillance, and geopolitical tension
- Data inequality and digital divides
- Talent bottlenecks and burnout risk
Of course, one’s mileage may very well vary – spatially, for example. I believe, for example, that cloud-native is an exciting developing paradigm. But from where I stand, I wouldn’t agree that:
Cloud‑native formats, tiling schemes, and vector/raster services solidified into de facto standards.
… if “de facto standard” means that it is common to serve up a collection of COGs2, COPCs3, GeoParquet files and similar in place of more traditional web services. For one, I experience the tooling around cloud-native data still very much as “under development”.
Still: Interesting list to reminisce before 2026 starts.
Footnotes
“Enshittification” is a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow. In my opinion, it is used relatively loosely here. As I understand it, Doctorow coined “enshittification” for the mechanisms prevalent specifically in two-sided online platforms and services. Regarding “two-sided”: think, for example, web search which serves two sides of the market with – often – conflicting interests, namely the (end-)users and (enshittification says: over time, more and more) the advertising customers. In my opinion, the two-sidedness is at the core of the mechanisms of enshittification (Wikipedia seems to agree), but I struggle to see that GIS is a strongly two-sided market today.↩︎
Cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs↩︎
Cloud-optimized point clouds↩︎