I’ve been following the news about ArcGIS Explorer, ESRI’s putative response to virtual globe software like Google Earth, since it was first announced (James Fee, for example, has blogged about it a lot), but I haven’t blogged about it myself. I generally consider ESRI products beyond my capabilities (even if I did have a Windows machine to run them on) and defer to the pros.

In that vein, let me say that last week’s in-depth review of ArcGIS Explorer by Ogle Earth’s Stefan Geens impressed me a whole hell of a lot, both for its thoroughness and on-point analysis. Stefan’s conclusion:

[ArcGIS Explorer] shows promise as a tool for looking at somebody else’s GIS work, but it’s very much in Beta and it shows — a lot of basic functionality is still only half implemented. I don’t want to complain about the lack of compelling high resolution imagery — ArcGIS users are supposed to provide the maps, after all — but the slowness of the downloads of ArcGIS Explorer’s default globes really makes the application a chore to use out of the box.

At this stage, it is difficult to see AGX ever being anything more than a niche player among virtual globes. There’s nothing wrong with that, but after a year of anticipation, fueled in part by comments from ESRI that certainly didn’t disabuse us of the notion they were building a “Google Earth Killer” (for example Jack Dangermond’s comments in June), AGX disappoints.