I started filling out the same survey that J Singh blogged about and I’m going to try and read the tea leaves and figure out exactly what ESRI is really asking here. J posted mostly about the DVD questions so I won’t bother with that, but the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension questions got me thinking. The question before talked about the ArcPress which is now available “free” with any ArcView or greater license asks if you actually use it. Seems like a pretty good question. Then the next three talk about the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension; do you have it, do you use it and will you buy it. No other questions about any other extensions. I’m going to read between the lines here (this is partly hope) and guess ESRI is beginning to think that the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension might be best rolled up into the standard ArcGIS deployment, much like ArcPress is (not that too many people care about ArcPress these days). Of course there is no way to really tell that this is the case, but it makes just so much sense from ESRI’s part to include interoperability by default that they really need to just do so (and with an ArcView license).

The next question got me thinking too, do you still use ArcInfo Workstation. Could ESRI be thinking of moving away from Workstation being released beyond 9.x? Pretty good question…