Is it even possible to say the name of ESRI founder and president Jack Dangermond without conjuring the image of a certain devil-may-care, one-eyed cartoon mouse? I ask because there are a few particularly interesting items from dane-gerrr-monnnnd among the answers to the ESRI User Conference questionnaire.

(OK, I’ll admit that dane-gerrr-monnnnd might have been a bit much, even for readers who might conceivably find ESRI’s pre-conference questionnaire “interesting.” It’s a reference to the DangerMouse theme song. What can I say? I watched a lot of Nickeloden in the mid-80s.)

I can’t seem to link directly to individual questions, so I’ll just summarize a few here. Click on over to ESRI if you’re interested in the full Q&A.

The tentative timeline toward ArcGIS 9.3: Service Pack 3 in July, SP4 in October or November, and 9.3 in the first quarter of 2008. Why am I looking forward to SP3? Because I’m running WinXP x64 at work. And why does that matter? Because ESRI says SP3 will (finally) include support for 64-bit processors. And why am I, in classic Rumsfeldian fashion, posing so many questions to myself? I don’t know. I’ll stop now.

Less happily, desktop versions of ArcGIS won’t include support for multiprocessor hardware until “the release following ArcGIS 9.3.” Sigh. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of viewing my box (No, that’s not a euphemism. Mind out of gutter, please.), last year I somehow found myself in possession of a ridiculous workstation with two 64-bit dual-core 3.73 GHz Xeon processors stuffed inside. How this happened is a story in itself, so I’ll spare you the details and simply say that I’m disappointed ArcGIS won’t be taking advantage of all that horsepower for quite some time.

More platform news: For all the tens and tens of people in the world desperate to run ArcGIS in Vista, ESRI says it will add Vista support for desktop versions of 9.2 in the third quarter of this year, and all products starting with version 9.3. They also note, rather ominously, that “due to some issues with Vista, several patches from Microsoft will be required in order to run ArcGIS under Vista.” Sure, sounds fine to me.

Finally, here’s a question that’s particularly relevant if, like me, you work in a Mac-based office. Also intriguing if you’re simply sick of keeping a Windows box around solely to run ArcGIS, collect dust and endanger your network: Will ESRI support Macintosh computers?

“We continue to follow the trends in the Mac industry and our users’ requests for support for the Mac platform. While we don’t certify it, we have seen the ArcGIS Desktop software running under Windows emulation mode using the “Boot Camp” capability included with the new versions of the Mac OS and hardware. This solution has very good performance.”

Very good performance, eh? Something to keep in mind next capital budget season.