Cross-over Points

Just as I was thinking about writing this, I attended an excellent luncheon talk by Barry Jay Katz (Chevron Fellow) on Anatomy of a Source Rock where he showed the following plot.

He posed the question "Where is the cross-over?" I'm pretty sure I've drawn this correctly, but memory may fail me, so you might want to find a backup source, but the point is that I'd been thinking about cross-over points already, and had even scribbled out the following plot immediately after a meeting where there was a heated discussion about the term "big data."

A big change I've seen over the past couple of years is an attitude among independent geoscientists and start-ups that could be called "Software? We don't need your stinkin' software!" The seemingly exponential growth of accessible programming tools and open-source code has put power into the hands of the user. To borrow a phrase from Grant Sanden at Enersoft, where they are "democratizing data," these new tools are democratizing software. It'll be interesting to see what this means for data and software providers that have built highly profitable businesses on charging a lot for their stuff. If I was one of those companies, I'd be thinking really hard about this, not just blogging about it.

Thanks for reading!

-Amy