[Qgis-user] QGIS vs ArcGIS in Education and Practice

[Blumentrath, Stefan]

Hi,

There is http://gisgeography.com/mapping-out-gis-software-landscape/

Which hopelessly overrates ArcGIS, also because of a US centric perspective. However, the Authors use Google trends and statistics on GIS.SE to rank popularity of GIS. And if you do that QGIS is nr. 1 in Europe at least. Note also the trend in the google trends curves, esp. If you take Italy as an example.
People close to retirement can probably stick to Arc, but people who are students now will have to learn open source in their career, no doubt...
Even in a rich country like norway a significat number of university courses on GIS (esp. such related to ecology) switched to Open Source and mostly QGIS...

Cheers
Stefan
________________________________________
Von: Qgis-user [qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] im Auftrag von Markus Weidenbach [landconsult at freenet.de]
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 15. Dezember 2016 20:07
An: qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
Betreff: [Qgis-user] QGIS vs ArcGIS in Education and Practice

Dear List,

I was asked to give a 5 days international GIS training course at the university and proposed to do it with QGIS. The program leader finally insisted on doing it with ArcGIS arguing  that the students had better chances to find a job knowing ArcGIS rather than QGIS. This argumentation does not reflect my long professional experience as a GIS consultant at all!
But how can I proof that knowing QGIS is the better choice for young GIS professionals than ArcGIS (or at least that both systems are equally suited)?
Does anybody know any official numbers of GIS users worldwide or on the worldwide application of QGIS over ArcGIS?

I know the Master thesis from Boku Vienna (https://geoobserver.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/arcgis-vs-qgis/) but it is focused on a technical comparison of both systems only.
Also the link https://www.g2crowd.com/grid_report/documents/gis-winter-2016-report is not really helpful because it is based on some 40 reviews only and therefore not representative.
I really need to know some proven facts on the number of global QGIS users and renown companies using QGIS worldwide.

Thanks for your help in advance,
Markus

--
Dr. Markus Weidenbach
landConsult.de
Geographical Information Management
and Environmental Planning
D-77815 Bühl
Germany
e.mail see: http://landConsult.de