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Wrong thread. Not only 'time', learning something new consumes so-many-other things. It depends how you want to prepare yourself and how badly you need it. It'd be inventing wheels if we start camparing, check these wonderful discussions. http://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=159&f=1706&t=156450 http://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=93&f=993&t=147815 http://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=93&f=993&t=72550 No. General GIS has more components ESRI can think of. GDAL or IDL for instance, know more geoprocessing than them. OSGeo has made an army of 'spatialized' components to dig further into GIS than ESRI. TileMill can offer radically amazing map using plain simple JS and CSS. Combine with Mapbox, start creating eye catching maps. But we still need ESRI at some point. Think of enterprise GIS, ESRI can hold all in one suit - a web server (ArcGIS Online), an application server (AG Server), a spatial server (AG Desktop/Server), a data server (geodatabase support). GeoServer, the OSGeo flagship, has only two of them - application and spatial server. I wish Apollo has something to think of. As long as ESRI holds the 'dinosaur share' in the GIS industry, programmers will surely learn to live with it while few will keep digging for more.