ESRI is not the Microsoft of the GIS world, it is much more complex

I’ve been getting emails from people asking about ESRI and many of them think of ESRI as the Microsoft of the GIS world. Since people like analogies, try this one on for size:

ESRI is the Microsoft, Apple, Google, Sun, Lotus, Borland, Adobe, Oracle, IBM, and WordPerfect of the GIS world.

That is how you measure their contributions to GIS.