This started as a comment over on
James' blog, but it got a little long for just a comment.
"gonzo" had replied to the comment that “ESRI has no network infrastructure to compete with Google.” with this:
This point could be argued, considering that ESRI services are published from
AT&T data centers in Virginia and New Mexico, also offering triple
redundancy of power and geographic redundancy.
[UPDATE 12/7/06: upon re-reading this post today, I concluded that the section I have removed, did not add to the conversation.]I'd just like to point out that while ESRI hosts servers in "
AT&T data centers", Google and Microsoft have multiple data centers, with 100's of thousands of servers. While this infrastructure is not dedicated to their mapping applications (I'd hesitate to call them GIS's), they can leverage these to provide a level of service that's almost unparalled.
Thus, while I commend ESRI for hosting public globe services, I think it's unrealistic for users expect the same level of data streaming performance from these services that you will get from Google Earth or Virtual Earth.