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Esri is becoming like the Microsoft Office/SharePoint/Teams/Power ecosystem. Many of the individual products are of limited quality and better alternatives exist. But taken together they have network effects and are easier for corporations to manage and justify.

The open solution is QGIS and PostGIS. They are ridiculously capable. But I think the next battleground is actually access to data rather than the software. Esri have been building an open data repository that is becoming favoured by a lot of government organisations. They stream data to esri users and make people reliant on the cloud service. And add annoying intermediate steps for people wanting raw data suitable for loading into a real database.