Even my Aunt has ArcGIS 9.2!

Thursday, 1 March, 2007

OK, well not strictly true. Well, its not true at all, but it might as well be. ArcGIS 9.2 shipped mid-November to… commercial customers. Fair enough, they pay for it. Of course all the “cutting edge” work in research institutions will just have to wait until the guys at Redmond have bought a few new CD burners. Over on the far, fair, shores of this blessed isle, where we only receive 1 delivery a month, it was clearly just too much like hard work for ESRI to be able to deliver more than 25 batches of CDs at a time. And, once ESRI UK received their shiny batch of CDs they seemed only to be able to send them out at a rate of 1 a day. And just so they make it easy for staff, it goes out alphabetically, by institution. OK for Aberystwyth, not so happy for York. Except the machinations of senior management at ESRI had further plans. Instead, for those “heavy” users of GIS (incorporating ArcIMS/SDE) and, in particular, those on the only single honours GIS degree in the UK, no we’ll make them wait LONGER. Yes these institutions really aren’t important and aren’t training the next generation of technicians and users. So much so it doesn’t matter if we let them wait four months.

Not really what I call service…