Digital Earth Weblog

In a comment on my previous post James Fee suggests that ArcGIS Explorer will provide access to the public ArcWeb Services. As far as I can tell that means DOQQ imagery in the USA and lower resolution satellite data for everyone else. (Could be wrong here. Found nothing specific on the ArcWeb Services website.)

The BYO high resolution imagery approach essentially resticts ArcGIS Explorer to use behind the firewall. The licensing of higher resolution imagery will prevent most organisations, other than Google and Microsoft, from publishing it to the Internet. If you don’t have high resolution imagery you may as well publish your data in a web browser.

If, as suggested at OZRI, ArcGIS Explorer does require ArcGIS Server then an ArcGIS Explorer application is definitely not free. ArcGIS Explorer may provide incentive for organisations to purchase ArcGIS Server, I’d suggest that very few organisations will publish data on the public Internet using ArcGIS Explorer. The cost of the infrastruture to support a potentially large number of users is likely to be significant. Google provides most of that infrastructure for free (other than the yet to be sighted advertising).

My take, at this point in time, is that ArcGIS Explorer is going to remain a niche product. It looks like it could be a very useful product within that niche. It may even be good enough to kick Google Earth off ESRI’s turf, but I’ve seen nothing to suggest that ArcGIS Explorer is going to make anything but a tiny ripple in the Google Earth ocean. Google are too good at providing free tools that lots of people want to use.

Update

James fee has responsed to this post on his blog. I left a comment clarifying that…

Roughly speaking, I