Mapinfo Users Still Love the Software - Just Hate Pitney Bowes

We have many friends, clients and academic colleagues who moved it on over to MapInfo from Atlas GIS after ESRI acquired Atlas in 1996.  Indeed, we still have many Atlas GIS users, and RPM still supports them, too. 

At that time, ArcView was not considered by many to be on par with MapInfo in functionality or interface or value.  Most of all, it was thought to be business-unfriendly.  My friend Tony Burns changed all of that, leading the effort in creating the Business Analyst for ESRI, and made the business world safe from ArcView. It's hard to believe it is already nearly a year since we lost Tony.  I still have his original Product Launch document for Business Analyst.  To this day, it is the most thorough comparative analysis of business GIS software from the end user experience perspective that I’ve ever seen – though Hal Reid continues the tradition, for those of you who know Hal, for those who don’t, you should.

Last week, a thread popped up on the MapInfo discussion list soliciting user dis-satisfactions with MapInfo.  There have been very few responses, mostly concerning inflexibility in working with legends and tables compared to ArcMap.  And even when complaining, it’s clear that MapInfo users continue to find their platform to be better integrated and to offer more function and value in one place for one price than ArcView does.  It’s not just that it’s the software they know.

But boy, are they ticked off at Pitney Bowes, which bought MapInfo a few years ago now, and have now buried it under the “Pitney Bowes Business Insight” umbrella.  And I feel their pain.

About a year or 18 months ago now, I was invited by the MapInfo folks to attend a swell seminar on the Queen Mary along with about 50 other folks using business GIS in our area.  It was Old Home Week; well more than a dozen former Atlas GIS folks were there.  The seminar was well led by Moshe Benyamin, long the product manager, and many good ideas for improving the software were mentioned as we broke out into small groups and then reported and presented back.  Expectations ran high – they had repeated the exercise in many other cities, worldwide, and reported the results back to us.  It seemed that a major new release would result.  Bugs would be fixed, and extension embraced.

And then, Pitney Bowes used all this user input for sales and marketing, not to improve the product, and came out with a 10.5 release with a “bunch of buttons” and “eye candy” and cloud references. One prominent MapInfo user remarked that he could care less than a rodent's behind about the sheet metal changes.

Maybe the MapInfo 10.5 release is especially noxious because Esri’s ArcGIS 10 is so much improved.  Some may say, finally.  But honestly, ArcView caught up a long time ago.  And it has great people extending and supporting it.  And people like me to give it and Business Analyst a swift kick. 

As needed.

ADD PBBI responded to the MapInfo user list, offering a link to a website where users can make and comment on ideas for improvement.  Clicking on the link produces a blank page.
ADD ADD The page is now up.