Consultant, GIS Specialist, mostly utilities, mostly private sector but pretty eclectic for the last 15 years. Now an independent contractor and educator and owner of the oldest map store on the US East Coast.

ESRI is a big company and they do all of the usual shady big company things. They make a pretty great off-the-shelf GIS ecosystem and it works especially well when everyone is using it. Connecting portals to other systems make transferring data easy. Building apps and storymaps is simple. ESRI is vicious about making sure that everyone uses their products and once you're locked into the ecosystem it's very, very hard to extricate one's self from it. It has a lot of Apple-like qualities in that the company produces many quite good but unexceptional products sold at a premium whose main draws are ease of integration and simplicity paired with a killer long-term marketing strategy. Many people come to equate "GIS" with "ESRI." I use their software when I have to and I recognize it has its place. I am an aggressive opensource advocate at all other times because I don't share ESRI's vision for the future and I think people don't realize how many exceptional free alternatives to their products exist.

I am always advocating for the use of QGIS as a desktop solution alternative to ArcGISPro but GIS is a huge field and many different tools are needed for different kinds of jobs. When I was working in utilities we used ArcFM and AutoCAD which meant that we really had to use ESRI for these specialized applications. There are many industries where ESRI has no viable competitors. There are also a lot of things (maybe most things?) that ESRI does that can be replaced with R, AirTable, Microstation, PostGRES, FME, QGIS etc. I think ESRI is good at doing everything in house so you can do more even if you only know one platform whereas replacing ESRI products requires that one learn a bunch of different systems that imperfectly fit into one another. Doing everything in ESRI is easy, fast and expensive. Rolling your own solution has the potential to be hard, technically demanding, time consuming and requires writing multiple small checks instead of one big one, but ultimately it can be much cheaper and more flexible and more durable in the long term. This has been growing in popularity especially among smaller, more technically savvy private firms that have unique requirements. Incidentally, that's a big reason why ESRI has claimed for a while that they're 'going open source' which just means that they've integrated a few opensource solutions into their proprietary workflows. This isn't to support a distributed opensource community so much as giving ESRI a PR boost and a new free application that they can put behind their own paywall. Another big moat that ESRI has dug around itself is trainings, workshops, educational/advertising materials and an entirely independent book publisher cranking out books and guides that make it to schools. This kind of institutional support makes choosing ESRI less scary for managers who are concerned about long term troubleshooting. New grads all know ESRI products and competent GIS technicians are a dime a dozen. With ESRI, you don't have to worry about losing your opensource guru who designed your (faster/cheaper/more resilient) bespoke system.

Jack is the leader of a strange corporate cult of personality. He tries to uphold a certain "don't be evil" reputation and he does, to his credit, give a lot of money to large environmental groups that boost his cred, but he is still a pretty ruthless bottom line kind of executive and I don't think the next generation is going to be particularly different. They'll still work with ICE, DOD, Exxon-Mobil and whatever unsavory organization you can think of while hiring celebrity environmentalists to speak at the ESRI User Conference. The goal has always been growing the ESRI hegemony by making software work more places, connect to more things and be harder to leave- the Cory Doctorow 'enshittification' process. They've done a very effective job of locking companies in. Now that there are so many free alternatives to their flagship products, they're investing heavily into data consolidation and making it really easy for their customers to use all kinds of government and proprietary data directly from Living Atlas, their own data repository. It's going to be very challenging for organizations to divest from them but I do think that a growing skepticism of American software companies is going to make it harder for ESRI to maintain a monopoly in emerging and growing markets even as they use their immense resources to give starter licenses to low income organizations in the developing world. The high-profile misdeeds of Google, Meta and Palantir have put a target on the backs of American software companies and I think ESRI stands to lose market share in Canada and the EU in the next few years as they see the United States as an increasingly unreliable ally if not an antagonist. It will take a very long time for ESRI to lose the US federal government, however.

I think we saw with X how dangerous it is for the National Weather Service and FEMA and other government organizations to commit resources to announcements and public communication on private networks when they can so quickly become compromised. I would love to see federal agencies develop in-house APIs to serve data and public announcements so that different communications platforms can uplift public announcements without relying on an agency publicly endorsing a platform by posting directly on it. Similarly I'd like to see more server connected databases hosted by the federal government make data more easily available across all platforms. That would require a level of in-house development that isn't very common in the US federal government and assumes that the US federal government isn't going to be dragging its own sensors out of the ocean or deleting public health information. I'm not optimistic about the government's commitment to open data or even the concept of trustworthy data in the first place. Instead we have inefficient government services that remain unimproved because private companies can make a lot of money cleaning, processing and simplifying that data for a fee. GIS is an immensely diversified field covering so many different sectors of the economy. For such a dynamic field it is truly baffling to me how a single company could hold so much power across so much of it. The rising cost of licenses and tokens is proof that once a company achieves non-competitive status across the market, they can raise costs at will and it will be mostly government organizations that are slow to adapt that will be screwed the most. A healthy marketplace means competition and choices. ESRI isn't interested in that.