The United States of ESRI

James Fee’s latest posting about his experiences with ESRI technical support has unleashed a torrent of responses, most of which agree that the ESRI developer experience has gone downhill over the last few years, but some of which are downright surreal in their defence of the GIS giant:

ESRI should pull your blog off of the EDN page. If you don’t like ESRI then leave, don’t come to the Developer Summit and stop posting about ESRI.
– Kristina Howard

Wow! Go back to Russia, James, you commie freak!

This is a little off the deep end for brand loyalty. After all, James and the other people commenting on his blog are expressing dissatisfaction with a commercial service they paid a lot of money for. They aren’t bitching about their politicians, or the weather.

Ironically, a number of people commenting (yes, including me) are pointing out that the service level in the open source world, where much of the support is completely free, is far higher. My personal point is that if you go one step further and even pay for support in the open source world, it can be beyond exemplary, certainly far better than any large software company can hope to provide with phone banks and Teir 1, 2, 3 service levels.