I must say, my experience with ArcMap was more pleasant than I anticipated. The tutorial was very thorough and simple enough to follow. I was frustrated at first because I could not remote access the computer lab so I worked in the lab itself. Except for the one hiccup that happened when I first saved the document, it was smooth sailing from there on. I really like ingenuity and straightforwardness of the program ad I hope to develop more skills with this. 

This is a very useful tool, especially for civil engineers (my future aspiration). This program has plenty of useful applications for research and construction. I have no knowledge of the history of this program, but seeing as I used the tenth version, it has probably been around for some years now. I see this as a very successful product but I don't know enough about its competition to give my opinion that much importance.

With what I know, one of the pitfalls for this program might be the learning curve. Much like most Office or desktop programs, it is the success of the initial exposure that determines if the user will pursue mastering it. It is simple, but it has a multitude of applications that might turn the feeble or non-expert away. I compare this to excel. Most people can use it simply, make tables and simple spreadsheets without ever exploring its full capabilities, and then there will be the few that depend on it and succeed in mastering it.

This program (like excel) has a lot of potential. A lot of use, but only in specific fields. Its market is not as big as compared to other computer programs (eg. Word, power point) so it might not fare well in the business side. GIS are very useful in our daily lives for demographic studies and research, and we need to continue on improving these systems to better study human population and the world we populate.