ArcGIS 10 is here for some…

Sometime last week I received a message from my favorite GIS Software company AKA  ESRI that ArcGIS 10 was available. I read on with delight until I noticed that it was available for download. I read on and noticed that there was a little bit of  info there for requesting media so I logged on to the customer support portal… I had already requested media from a previous message almost a month ago so I called downstairs to see if any media had arrived. I was told no. I read more on the customer portal and followed the links which BTW took a long time to load in my browser. Heck the long weekend was near so I figured folks were sucking up bandwidth. To my utter annoyance there was a statement saying that backup media was going to take 6 weeks. 6 Weeks? Must be a mistake! I was not happy and mentioned to our ESRI rep in no uncertain terms that this was unacceptable. Given that we are paying over $20K in maintenance per year for the software (the cost of a half time staff which I desperately need), waiting 6 weeks to get media is just ridiculous! So now they are dividing customers with low bandwidth and high bandwidth first they stopped shipping us a nice box with media and users guide I actually used those things now we have to download our help files and users guide and now we have to download these large files which does not play well with our IT folks at all. No they are not happy when I download large files during regular working hours… When you add  ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Server and the extensions that we need to download that is some serious bandwidth and sorry to say but its not like their servers are as fast as the Google Servers  even loading their " free basemaps” to use in our web apps  is a hog on our server…

I just think its a shame that ESRI has chosen to treat its paying customers this way. If you have large bandwidth you can have ArcGIS 10 now. If you have not its a 6 week wait for you. Sucks! I won’t repeat what my colleague called them when I relayed this bit of info.