GoogleEarth Pro vs. ArcView Explorer: GIS for the Masses?

Declan Butler wrote on his blog way back in Dec. 2005: A swathe of new tools is emerging, from the basic to the highly-functional, which allow shapefiles and other formats to be easily converted to kml, and so to be visualized in Google Earth. One of the most functional is Arc2Earth, scheduled for release in January, developed by Brian Flood, president of Spatial Data Logic systems. I’d the pleasure of evaluating a pre-release version of this, and used it to convert data from the Global Registry of Migratory Species database.

Other more-basic tools include KML Home Companion, Export to KML, and ShapetoKML.
These tools mark progress, but of course require that you are have ArcGIS. More generic solutions to converting shapefiles to kml have been slower in forthcoming, although some scripts can do part of the job. The open source GIS players have, as far as I can see, also been slow to provide KML export to their products, but correct me if I’m wrong.

Meanwhile ESRI itself is scheduled to release in first quarter 2006 ArcGis Explorer, a free visualization tool, which is being billed by observers as a Google Earth killer, the screenshots, and comments from developers who have given it a tour, suggesting it does all that Google Earth does, but much, much, more — a Google Earth on steroids.