Comment by n8cpdx
1 day ago
LibreOffice vs Office 365/Google Drive is probably the more relevant comparison.
I won’t comment on market share, but even if theoretically QGIS totally displaced ArcGIS Pro/ArcMap/ArcGIS on the desktop, the arena of competition has shifted to ArcGIS Online and its competitors. And once you’re in ArcGIS Online, Pro becomes the convenient choice for desktop editing.
LibreOffice could be miles better than Office on desktop, but the competition is lost because Office on desktop is just an accessory for Office 365 (which competes with Google Docs/Drive).
Disclosure: I work at Esri.
I don't think the comparison is quite apt, because while LibreOffice has no support for collaborative workflows (short of error-prone shared drives), QGIS can connect to quite a few geospatial databases, with third parties offering plugins for their own cloud platforms.
It would be nice to have better support for browser-based sharing and editing, but the desktop-based parts are there already.
That’s an important point. The collaboration model is more complex in GIS because it’s not just documents (maps and map projects) but the underlying data is coming from databases that are independently editable.
The comparison still works in some ways though, because ArcGIS is selling you both the software (ArcGIS Pro, Map Viewer, Field Maps, etc) and the backing services (hosted feature services, basemaps, locators, etc), similar to how Office is selling you data hosting, sharing, and mobile + web app integration.
You can accomplish the same things with QGIS, GeoServer, QField, etc, but then you’re in the position of building a GIS from parts. Whereas with ArcGIS, setting up a new map and database (feature service) for data collection is a point-click workflow.
Of course you pay a premium for that level of integration.
> That’s an important point. The collaboration model is more complex in GIS because it’s not just documents (maps and map projects) but the underlying data is coming from databases that are independently editable.
Theres other complexity too, like 'how to avoid silent failures in ArcGIS Pro and Hosting Server'.
Case in point: say you use amazon RDS. URL for that object is name.customerID.environment.amazonrds.com . Its a long URL. Now you go into hostingServer/ArcGIS/manager and go set this as a data source. You can validate the data source and everything's fine...
Until your analysts add projects in RDS and go past some secret legacy arbitrary length of DNS+path. And if you do? Things will silently break, data won't come into ArcGIS Pro right. Anomalous errors.
Now, if you change the RDS DNS name to an IP address, all those problems go away! Everything's fixed, analysts are happy, and none are the wiser.
Until, Amazon does maintenance on your RDS, changing your IP address. Then, your environment then breaks for no good reason, and you have to be keenly aware to go to server manager and MANUALLY rerun data store check.
And no, ArcGIS monitor can't do this.
And... Dont even start me on 80070035. That "premium" support ticket was rotting for 5 weeks, until I ran into an engineer on LinkedIN, who solved it in 30 seconds.
This is spot on. I'd love it if it was possible to get the integration with the QGIS ecosystem. It could open source integrations or even a commercial offering that just joins things up in a cohesive way just something that enables a more smooth collaboration model.
That's an insightful nuance. I've seen you just create divisions in organisations because while it is a really fully featured desktop application, it implies a way of working that doesn't play well with the cloud, which creates barriers between experimenting and production.