You have doubtless identified that as a customer I am not
very happy with ESRI.
BA is not a cheap product. We find that the datasets,
while doubtless containing much useful information,
do not meet our needs. Nonetheless some of the supplied
tools seem useful and we are keeping an open mind
about continuing to use BA.
But.. when we discover that ESRI refuse to maintain
interface compatibility between BA10.0 and ArcGIS
Desktop 10.1 we become incensed. So we cannot
upgrade to ArcGIS 10.1, use the improvements
and bug fixes therein, without shelling out another
12K for BA -- a product which we have already purchased.
This is a continuing pattern with ESRI. The software
is already expensive but when purchased one finds that
there is something missing, something which casual
evaluation would think ought to be included in
an expensive product, and which is only available
if one shells out several thousand more dollars.
I believe that not maintaining interoperability
between two products with, respectively, version numbers
10.0 and 10.1, goes against generally accepted good software
standrads, and indeed amounts to sharp practice.
I may say also that these products seem to be chock
full of bugs and that their performance leaves
much to be desired.
Rob Stevens
NSW Corp.