Not having done much in terms of GIS work, I never had to deal with ESRI until last week.
I was on a call to ask some ESRI rep to add some labeled points to my client's existing map tool. It was a somewhat surreal, weird experience where I got the feeling they were making the work seem much more difficult than it was. Their estimate turned out to insanely off the (my) mark, at eye-watering hourly rates.
At first I thought they had enough business and didn't really care about us. But reading this thread, it seems I was wrong. They are the Oracle of the GIS industry.
In their (possible) defence, stepping outside the the narrow ESRI path of the way you're supposed to do things makes your life a massive pain. I used to work for a company that (among other things) developed tools for clients on top of ArcGIS Online. And I've had many calls where a client asks for a small and very reasonable change, and I embarrassingly have to explain that that is not the 'approved' way doing things in ArcGIS Online, so trying to make that change will essentially require us to rewrite a whole lot of components more or less from scratch and might no even be possible.
I've spent a large number of hours trying to fight ESRI software, lost more fights than I've won and even my victories have mostly been pyrrhic.
The business world needs to stop supporting Microsoft Office. The creative world needs to stop supporting Adobe Photoshop. The industrial design world needs to stop supporting Solidworks/AutoCAD. Everyone needs to stop supporting Microsoft Windows/Apple OSX. etc.
I've been telling people for years they should be using GIMP and Linux but nobody cares. At least Oracle's stranglehold seems to be weakening.
Yes, that is the apex of their human capital Ponzi scheme. But, you’d have to wait until the current profs who only know esri retire. Or until they put in the effort to learn how to use foss tools. The only motivation they might have, is a strong belief in foss or pressure from students who know esri is a trap.
But it's the other way around. Esri offers so much in the education sector apart from software licenses in a complete package, which you unfortunately have to search for in the FOSS sector.
Is there a better option for raw base tilesets? When making my app mapping world tides (https://solunar.pages.dev) I tried OSM for instance but it only had raster tiles at LoDPI resolutions available. ESRI on the other hand had full vector support in a variety of formats^ and provided great docs for integrating with FOSS rendering toolkits. The free tier seems generous, though once it runs out the price increases sharply.
^ For instance, a really neat one that renders ocean features in as much detail as the land typically gets
It's not the software licensing, but the independent consulting entourage that's the problem : internal confidential big four accountancy information told to me without any applicable restrictions on my repeating this put the cost of each Oracle database instance deployed in the F500 at over one hundred million dollars, due to the third party make work.
That author doesn't say Esri is a scourge; more like it's just generally bad to have only 1 provider in a space -- and that it's up to customers to change that by voting with their feet.
I think Esri is (and has been) in a very similar position to Microsoft's in the late 1990s -- having achieved market dominance, they feel like open source software is the biggest threat to their business. But I think the presence of QGIS is creating competition, which is nothing but good for the industry.
ESRI have similar network effect to Microsoft. No individual product is that great but taken together it is very competitive. And ArcGIS online is developing that network effect in a similar way to Office 365.
Also, the GIS space tends to have crossover between different departments in companies. You have a mix of IT departments, GIS specialists outside of IT departments managing infrastructure, data management, casual users etc. Each has a different budget and a different competitive environment. ESRI sits as a compromise between these different groups. Each group may be able to adopt a competitor but not gain traction outside their group.
isoprophlex|3 years ago
I was on a call to ask some ESRI rep to add some labeled points to my client's existing map tool. It was a somewhat surreal, weird experience where I got the feeling they were making the work seem much more difficult than it was. Their estimate turned out to insanely off the (my) mark, at eye-watering hourly rates.
At first I thought they had enough business and didn't really care about us. But reading this thread, it seems I was wrong. They are the Oracle of the GIS industry.
dagw|3 years ago
I've spent a large number of hours trying to fight ESRI software, lost more fights than I've won and even my victories have mostly been pyrrhic.
rat9988|3 years ago
RosanaAnaDana|3 years ago
nwallin|3 years ago
I've been telling people for years they should be using GIMP and Linux but nobody cares. At least Oracle's stranglehold seems to be weakening.
2devnull|3 years ago
gonzo41|3 years ago
dinkumthinkum|3 years ago
dvisca|3 years ago
jakear|3 years ago
^ For instance, a really neat one that renders ocean features in as much detail as the land typically gets
kabes|3 years ago
samstave|3 years ago
Have an AI crawl a RASTER dataset and VECTORIZE all lines into SVG.
dinkumthinkum|3 years ago
walrus01|3 years ago
retcond|3 years ago
Ed. "deployed"/"deployment" 0400GMT
TimTheTinker|3 years ago
I think Esri is (and has been) in a very similar position to Microsoft's in the late 1990s -- having achieved market dominance, they feel like open source software is the biggest threat to their business. But I think the presence of QGIS is creating competition, which is nothing but good for the industry.
(I worked as a developer for Esri for 15 years)
7952|3 years ago
Also, the GIS space tends to have crossover between different departments in companies. You have a mix of IT departments, GIS specialists outside of IT departments managing infrastructure, data management, casual users etc. Each has a different budget and a different competitive environment. ESRI sits as a compromise between these different groups. Each group may be able to adopt a competitor but not gain traction outside their group.