definitely agree to this. And one segment that they could (should) definitely get customers are those who use ArcGIS. As someone who previously worked in oil & gas, the tax that these companies pay to Arc for all their mapping data is just crazy. I've always wondered why there isn't a solid tech company that could build a product that could take over Arc's business. Looking forward to Felt!
> I've always wondered why there isn't a solid tech company that could build a product that could take over Arc's business
A few reasons:
1.) many geotech companies require on premise installations because they want control of their data and/or the internet quality at remote sites is poor. This means that a SaaS solution is a non-starter.
2.) Most geotechs are already familiar with Arc tools due to Arc’s aggressive marketing to universities
3.) Arc is a swiss army knife which can do most things “good enough”. For most businesses Arc can do what they want out of the box. Products like felt only have 1/10th or less of the functionality as Arc.
We are in the process of replacing Arc with our own custom platform at my company. If you are a heavy user of Arc you quickly outgrow the capabilities of the system. We want to serve petabytes of geotechnical data, and Arc quickly starts to choke on data sizes that large. The operational work of keeping Arc up and running smoothly is also a major headache since you don’t have access to the source code and the error messages in Arc are very poor which means you rely on ESRI support a lot.
Esri has been around for a long time, it’s basically MS Excel for anybody who has to make maps for work.
Their pro software and online services have kept up with the times, you can do almost anything in the program as well. And there’s multiple ways to do each thing.
It also has its own internal logic that people get used to like photoshop.
I believe it’s a private company too which means they aren’t always pleasing shareholders
