It seems like the ArcGIS Explorer development team is trying to rub my office's horrifically slow network connection in my face.

After yesterday's release of the newest build of ArcGIS Explorer, I was interested in trying it out. So I downloaded it (and yes, the download took forever), installed it (and no, the install didn't take long at all), ran it, and waited. And waited. And waited some more. It took *forever to load just the initial globe.

But finally the globe loaded and I started to take a look around the interface.

I ended up clicking on the "Help" menu and found a new "Test connection speed..." tool.

After running the tool, here's what I was told:

I know what they're going for here, but still thought it was funny that ESRI was actually telling me not to use their application. And no, I am not on a dial-up connection at work.

This brings up an interesting question: as bandwidth becomes more and more of a precious commodity in some organizations (like the one that I work for), are IT staff still going to allow users to install these bandwidth-heavy virtual globe applications? And even if IT staff are supportive, won't most users get frustrated with the performance of these applications in situations where bandwidth is in scarce supply and stop using them?

I know that bandwidth is going down in price and improving for most organizations, but there are a lot of companies out there that can't (or aren't willing to) keep up with the growing bandwidth requirements of a web-centric world. It would be a folly for the major mapping vendors to ignore this group of users.

This realization is why we're currently focused on high-performing (and lightweight) web map implementations and not standalone desktop applications that consume centrally-located services. This is also why we're beginning to outsource some of our more bandwidth-intensive services. In short, we don't foresee our resources (network, hardware, and otherwise) growing any time soon, but we do see that we'll be expected to increase the quality of our services and will be serving more users than ever in the near future.