Thinking the Unthinkable

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures. - Samuel Johnson.

My reaction was quite confused when I heard that LH Systems and Carl Zeiss would no longer pursue the expansion of the LH-joint venture to include Zeiss. The new company was to be named LHZ and would have allowed Zeiss some 33% participation. After almost one year of haggling with regulatory authorities of the European Union, all the parties seem to have become fed-up. Anti-trust regulators tend to be mercenary and bureaucratic, sometimes moving the post at the slightest whim. Delaying ventures is their stock in trade. They rarely tell you "NO", preferring to issue several "MAYBEs" in the interim. The financial cost of such delays can be bruising, not to talk of the additional public relation costs in a mapping industry that is sometimes obsessed with appearances.

When the initial announcement was made I took my time to look at it before writing my article in Geoinformatics of May 1998. I did not find it attractive as a ‘consolidation’, but on closer inspection I felt it offered the opportunity to integrate research resources that are running out of steam in Photogrammetry. We are being told by some pundits that digital photogrammetry is still in transition, and the integration of machine vision tools have rendered only limited benefits. Even semi-automated feature extraction tools are begging for further investment in their research.

Doing good business is tough in a highly competitive atmosphere like Photogrammetry. You need good ideas on new products and services, and even better strategies in finding the perfect partners for synergy and synthesis. The basic impression was that Zeiss was a better marriage partner for Intergraph or ISM, and they had a fairly enduring courtship. This would have offered less duplication but this could also have stretched R+D resources far and wide. The Zeiss-LH alliance could only have been sighted via a small corridor. This alliance would have initially struggled with some duplication in their product-line but it offered some exciting possibilities down the road. If it is any consolation, I have to congratulate the original instigators for their visionary audacity.

But it is to Intergraph that Zeiss has turned to rejuvenate the old alliance into a proper marriage via a new company that will be named Z/I Imaging. Z/I will combine ‘complementary’ products of Intergraph’s Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Division and Zeiss’ Photogrammetry and Aerial Reconnaissance Division, all based on the Windows-NT platform. Intergraph will take 60%, and from the information available, will also dominate the distribution of authority in Z/I. It becomes understandable that Zeiss would have preferred the alliance with LH which may have offered them a more respectable share of authority. If this new deal is trapped in another merry-go-round of EC-bureaucracy, Zeiss will rue their luck.