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.]