ArcGIS Explorer public beta available “later this year”

ArcGIS Explorer Public Beta Available “Later This Year”

April 13th, 2006 · 18 Comments · ArcGIS Explorer, ESRI, GIS

For those of you interested in the public beta of ArcGIS Explorer you’ll want to take note of the updated ArcGIS Explorer product page:

A public beta of ArcGIS Explorer will be available for download later this year.

Yikes!

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18 responses so far ↓

1 Mike // Apr 13, 2006 at 5:03 pm

Yikes is right. The longer ArcGIS Explorer takes to make an appearance the harder it will be to make it anything other than an interesting but obscure spatial browser. While Google Earth’s mindshare keeps snowballing…
2 David Davis // Apr 13, 2006 at 7:39 pm

Damn, I was looking forward to finally playing with it.
3 walt // Apr 13, 2006 at 8:21 pm

I agree with Mike. They need to get this thing out the door. They’re really hurting themselves with the slow rollout.
4 Larry Renolds // Apr 13, 2006 at 8:26 pm

Oye, that isn’t good.

Guess we won’t be deploying ArcGIS Explorer this year.
5 CHris // Apr 13, 2006 at 10:45 pm

Dude- it’s going to worth it when it comes out. I have it and use it all the time.
6 Mike // Apr 14, 2006 at 6:10 am

Oh, OK… that changes everything.
7 SGD // Apr 14, 2006 at 6:11 am

I’d hazard a guess that ArcGIS Explorer will never come close to overtaking GoogleEarth except in the mind of ESRI users.

GE streams imagery faster than ESRI, to date, could ever dream of doing from a local drive much less across the Web. It does everything 99% of the population needs it to do. It’s extemely simple to use. It has better brand recognition than ESRI will ever have.
8 Mike // Apr 14, 2006 at 6:36 am

SGD, I couldn’t agree more with your assessment.

Personally, I think the whole ArcGIS Explorer project smacks of JD’s pride getting the better of him and causing a spastic shift in ESRI’s direction. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: ESRI, stop chasing windmills and get your core products up to snuff with respect to quality, performance and scalability. It’s these core products that fund your company and it’s these core products that differentiate you from the rest of the market.
9 Phillip Holmstrand // Apr 14, 2006 at 8:38 am

Well said Mike, sounds like the words of someone who spends each day in the trenches with ESRI software. As long as we are calling JD out…

Jack: stop trying to make Internet GIS and 3D a reality and first get it right first with the 2D stuff, also some focus on enterprise support would be nice. Why do I keep hearing words like “Citrix” associated with enterprise ESRI deployments? Seems just wrong to me.

Why must every upgrade to SDE mean an upgrade to clients? The new focus should be compatibility across versions. A 15 year old database application can still talk to MS SQL 2005, so why can’t my 2 year old ArcMap 8.1 software talk to SDE 9.1?

Things like that may not seem like a big deal when you are dealing with a 5 person GIS shop, but increase the number to hundreds and you have got a big problem.

With ArcGIS Explorer you’re talking millions of installs… so I’d imagine making them all talk to a central server without worrying about versions would be a tougher nut to crack. How about starting with the easy stuff first and taking care of your existing products first. Mike and I would appreciate it! =o)
10 Matthew // Apr 14, 2006 at 9:37 am

Yea! C’mon Jack… Stick to what you are good at (and spend some time to nail down compatibility issues).

You can only put so much onto one swiss army knife before it makes more sense to buy a few extra tools to get the job done right.
11 av8tor // Apr 14, 2006 at 10:50 am

Really, why bother with ArcGIS Explorer? Just use World Wind and get it over with.

Honestly I’m just so tired of these releases that promise so much and cause more problems than their worth. I had thought 9.2 was going to be a “bug fix” release, but it seems like its a feature release and will require 9.3 to fix it.
12 Soxsfan // Apr 14, 2006 at 10:52 am

Good point guys. Do we really want an ESRI 1.0 product like ArcGIS Explorer? I’m sure it will be as bad as the beta has been.

I’ve got AGX on my computer right now, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I bothered to open it (i’m sure it has been over a month).
13 Erin // Apr 14, 2006 at 11:30 am

Who cares about AGX. Lets fact it, our users want Google Earth. The ship has sailed on AGX and I’d rather see ESRI spend the time with better KML support than this “white elephant”.
14 Sean Gillies // Apr 14, 2006 at 11:50 am

Hey, is this the part of the thread where people flood in and demand that James the Heretic be blacklisted from all things ESRI?
15 James Fee // Apr 14, 2006 at 12:44 pm

Has that happened before?
16 Steven White // Apr 14, 2006 at 10:03 pm

Talk about irrelivant. I mean who really cares about ArcExplorer. Google Earth is dominate and with ArcGIS Server supporting KML, who needs this?
17 Bryan Hall // Apr 15, 2006 at 10:41 am

Make ArcGIS Explorer:

* A Java Applet / Application (no windows installation required)
* Use WFS and WMS (not some ESRI ArcSomething protocol) in addition to KML
* An open source project

…and they might have something. Otherwise, it’s irrelevant.
18 GIS Dirtbag » Blog Archive » End of June, where is ArcGIS Explorer? // Jun 28, 2006 at 1:31 pm

[...] I’m sure many are asking themselves where ArcGIS Explorer is? It is the end of June and I don’t see anything on ESRI’s website telling me where I can download it. I saw where Adena said she heard from the horses mouth that it would be out late June, but maybe James was right. YIKES indeed. [...]