Comments on: ArcGIS Explorer vs. Google Earth

By: david lawrence

david lawrence — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 09:34:35 +0000

firs hi James long time no see. keep up the good work.

It always frustrates me to see so much banter back and forth about GE and ESRI.
I have been a GE AND ESRI user from the early days of keyhole. And you can do some amazing animation based displays that arc scene was not able to do at the time. But on the analytical side GE is not even on the same track at esri. Just admit they are 2 different products that can be used individually or combined to enhance each other.
I recently finished a project where I took data coverageâ€™s from arc map, over laid them into GE created a fly over in the movie maker plug-in and then took that file into final cut, and then aftereffects for the final video product.
Using some of the logic in the arguments on this page I should only had to use one of these tools. To create, analyze, animate, and present my data. Thatâ€™s an interesting argument but it doesnâ€™t work like that in reality.
So to act as if you can have all the functions of the all the ARC Packages in the free GE they are not there. It is great software but you canâ€™t compare the two.

Be thankful for the tools you have, enhance them expand them with your expertise, and it will stretch the imaginations of the programmers.

By: mapperz

mapperz — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:52:23 +0000

http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2006/12/esri-arcgis-explorer-beta-gis-for.html

just another happy? user

no it’s not my blog!

mapperz
http://mapperz.blogspot.com/

By: pitix

pitix — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 05:17:03 +0000

Don’t bug Ed Parsons, he’s leaving the OS. see http://edparsons.com/

By: mark

mark — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:05:15 +0000

Derek, I am not sure what you are using GE for but from my experience you cannot do nearly as much with it as you can with ArcGIS. It sounds like you are new to the GIS world and have a limited knowledge of all that the discipline does. If you are an individual, a thousand dollars for a license may be costly, but for a business this number is not unheard of for software. Unfortunately open source software is still a long way behind companies such as ESRI, MapInfo, and Intergraph; I have yet to see free software do nearly as much as these bundles, nor can the free software render vector as quickly. As for VE or GE taking over the GIS industry, they have a long way to go to tap into the business market, but do provide a starting point for personal users that just want to view pre-made maps.

By: Derek

Derek — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 14:57:40 +0000

Man I wish I was apart of the ESRI’s secret club. Too bad I don’t have $30,000 just to use a ridiculous program that you could easily use all of the same features in GE. I agree and am as frustrated as Mapperz. ESRI continues its quest to segregate the users who have some money and companies/government that has millions to throw away at this junk. I’m glad GE and VE are getting into the game. It’s about time for some competition. When I went to “ArcGIS 9.2 on the road” a few months back, I asked if the ArcGIS desktop version would run better than the previous versions. The answer that I got was, “Oh, you’ll have to have ArcGIS Server for this that and everthing else.” I don’t work with terra bytes of information and I could care less about their lame IMS. I really think ESRI caters to those people who think GIS is just like AutoCAD and say stuff like, “your a GIS Wizard.” Wait don’t touch that! That could cause ArcGIS to crash! I’m done.

By: Jesse L.

Jesse L. — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:21:25 +0000

James, your emphasis on AGX specifically being a client for AGS is a point well taken.

I work for a relatively large-scale non-profit organization that received a HUGE annual donation of ESRI software licenses (which is pretty nice of ESRI really.) BUT, realistically we’re probably not going to be able to implement our own in-house AGS server… Does that mean AGX is going to be worthless to us?

I guess if I just want non-GIS co-workers to be able to view spatial data (shapefiles, rasters, etc.), than I can just use ArcPublisher/ArcReader or I could develop an open source web mapping solution (or, gasp, just print out a map!)

By: James Fee

James Fee — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:54:01 +0000

Mark, the new Web ADF has that nice AJAX look and feel that people are used to using with Google Earth. That is the big change with ArcIMS (as well as great new web based admin tools).

By: mark

mark — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:51:23 +0000

I am very impressed with ArcGIS Explorer. I wouldn’t mind seeing some of the new developments to ArcIMS either (as the last one I worked with was 4). I am interested to know if the pan feature works in real time yet (similar to google maps), or if it’s still required to load every time a new map tile is queried. I currently work with mapxtreme from MapInfo, and see similar issues with it, the public has got used to google maps and demands the same features.

By: cadfg

cadfg — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:44:52 +0000

James, you have by far the most credibility out there on this stuff. I don’t want to take anything away from Directions Magazine, but when you speak on issues such as this, it carries a ton of weight with organizations such as ours.

We’ve been following your blog for over a year and the posts you’ve made in the past month are so well thought out from our perspective (as GIS Professionals). The balance you show on subjects like this ArcGIS Explorer really helps us understand the marketplace and how organizations such as ours should fit in it.

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:53:29 +0000

Chad GE really is a good App. I can understand why people want to compare it to Explorer, but they really do different things, both of them well.