The various products had branched out into multiple source trees and did not integrate well with one another.
Other Esri products included MapObjects, a programming library for developers, and ArcSDE as a relational database management system. Prior to the ArcGIS suite, Esri had focused its software development on the command line Arc/INFO workstation program and several Graphical User Interface-based products such as the ArcView GIS 3.x desktop program.
