Cédric Jeanneret has a lot of questions on the IUCN-Microsoft partnership on Red Lists. Here’s a couple to be getting on with:
What and where are Microsoft’s GIS/spatial analysis know-how and capacity? No doubt its Computational Ecology and Environmental Science team could create an excellent geo-analysis tool in no time, but should we expect another, MS-proprietary geo-file standard? Probably not-so-proprietary, since Microsoft and ESRI are long-time partners, and certainly that partnership had something to do with the MS-IUCN collaboration. This then gives some sense to the new partnership. Most certainly a greater part of the SSC experts use ESRI software, so why not deal with ESRI directly and its arcgis.com platform? One reason could be that the ‘Red List’ is bigger than ESRI, so big so that only a corporation like MS could handle the data and queries.
Read them all.