Monday, December 15. 2008

CBR Offers "Rare" Interview with Dangermond

CBR (Computer Business Review) offers a "business-y" interview. I'm not sure why the author describes it as rare; Dangermond has always been generous with his time for journalists. There are some statements worthy of note (below), but the responses tend to confirm what those who've been working with ESRI already know (unlikely to buy or become a public company, is not consumer focused, but rather professionally focused, focused on Windows).

The interesting statements:

"Microsoft, with the acquisition of Navteq, and Nokia will play into that space [mapping technologies] as well as larger players."
[That's an error; Nokia acquired NAVTEQ.]

"ESRI is philosophically very supportive of the open source movement and we have engineered our tools so they live inside an open source sandwich."
[I'm not sure what an open source sandwich is, but certainly ESRI and many other proprietary solutions work with open source. ESRI and others build their solutions on some open source code, too.]

"I don’t think we do [face much competition from open source]. It’s a political movement as well as a technical effort. People who buy our products don’t typically want to buy open source because they want to acquire total integrated support for their mission critical applications."
[Open source software has no license or royalty fee.]

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, ESRI, Open Source, Oops, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, NAVTEQ at 07:29 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) |

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Paul Ramsey takes Jack to task on 2 of the 3 issues you mention. http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2008/12/jack-in-box.html

#1 Ron on 2008-12-15 16:03 (Reply)

The comment about problems with open source in commercial environments is a fair one I think - we have problems taking open source into production environments because we have to be able to back off the risk of something going wrong with the product. There is always a tug between the commercial people and the techies on this issue because risk typically has to be given a real value on a project balance sheet. Can be very frustrating when we see such amazing stuff cropping up!

#2 Paul Crisp on 2008-12-16 04:04 (Reply)

"we have problems taking open source into production environments because we have to be able to back off the risk of something going wrong with the product."

I'm sure you NEVER have that problem with proprietary software...

#2.1 someone on 2008-12-16 07:26 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Ron on 2008-12-15 16:03 #2: Paul Crisp on 2008-12-16 04:04   #2.1: someone on 2008-12-16 07:26
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?   Subscribe to this entry