ArcGIS is a platform consisting of a group of geographic information system (GIS) software products produced by Esri. The GIS Stack Exchange should be considered for questions with this tag.
Overview
ArcGIS consists of products, versions, applications, license levels and components.
ArcGIS was first launched in 1999 and excepting server offerings is available on Microsoft Windows only. Prior to 1999 Esri had a number of different product lines (ArcView3, ArcInfo Workstation, MapObjects, ArcSDE) on Unix and Windows that were loosely integrated and sometimes incompatible. Many of these products can be interacted with via programming languages, such as VBA, .NET languages, and Python.
Tag usage
Consider whether the question is more suitable on Stack Overflow SE or GIS SE which has separate tags for its products and components e.g. arcgis-desktop
, arcgis-server
, arcpy
, arcsde
, etc