So a GIS specialist friend of mine asked me (a dev) to do a quick viability study for developing a reporting app (add-in) in ArcGIS.
Over the past two weeks I have obtained two versions of ArcGIS (DHL DVD's back and forth), been in touch with support twice and wasted hours online just to get the (insert crude language here) program running. And now, it turns out that the SDK is not available for download and also not available in the evaluation version I have recently managed to get going.
Ok, so maybe I wasn't too smart about getting my dev environment up and running. Others might not have experienced these frustrations, but I just find ArcGIS archaic. The licensing structure, the ridiculous pricing for the developer network and the messy API documentation.
ESRI should learn from companies such as RIM. It should be easy for developers to develop on-top of your software. In my opinion, there's too many hoops to jump through. Keep it simple. Make it easy for us to use your software and to enrich it.
Time is money, and I just wasted a pile of it.
