Saturday 18 June 2011

ESRI Drama for ArcGIS

ESRI Basic, Standard, Advanced are the new View, Editor, Info.  And you know what?  It makes perfect sense to me, I’ve been telling Esri to fix this problem for years and finally they’ve had to guts to do so.  ArcView has been devalued in the Esri stack for years.  It can’t edit SDE Geodatabases, it can’t edit advanced cartography and it sure as heck can’t handle advanced analysis.  Editor is the standard authoring tool in the Esri world and if that bothers you, take your money elsewhere.  There are lots of other tools out there that duplicate or exceed ArcGIS for Desktop Basic that are either a fraction of the cost or free.

ArcView users are nothing but a drain on Esri resources.  They don’t want to pay for the features Esri wants to sell, clutter the support forum with questions about NAD83/WGS84 conversions and want VBA to continue as a scripting engine in ArcGIS for Desktop.  Getting emotional about a product that didn’t change what it was  and is now more aptly named given its purpose is a distraction to the reality you live in.  Finally I can look at Esri’s desktop lineup and understand the purpose of each application.  View/Editor/Info are confusing arbitrary terms that mean nothing to anyone but a small niche of users.

The cold hard facts of the matter is that if you wish to play in Esri’s silo, you need to have ArcGIS for Desktop Standard.  Otherwise, what’s the point?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Share This Post