soda, I understand fully, but I've never heard anyone say SDTS posed any kind of threat to ESRI or was ever meant to.
The idea of SDTS is to provide the USGS and other governmental organizations an interface method. This can be implemented with ESRI products. They never threatened each other and they work together. In fact, SDTS is very popular and is the best way in some circles to interface AutoCAD (DGX), Microstation (DGN), Integraph (SIF), MapInfo (MIF), and ArcInfo (shapefiles) files.
Did your own example make any sense to you? Maybe if you had understood it, you could have applied it in this scenario and learned something--that open data exchange is a good thing, that standards can be built by a governing body to allow commercial products to interact, etc.
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