James Fee noted this NASA program that competes with Google Earth.

Many of our clients can't use Google Earth because of its license and I'’m sure others will begin to run into that problem. World Wind might just be the solution and we'll see how well it handles Shapefiles.

I noted on the World Wind website that they are using USGS Quads for the United States, which might put them a leg up on Google, with gets pretty fuzzy in rural areas. I'm downloading it now and am going to try it out.

James Fee picked up on my rant about the Developer's conference. I was stating my angst about the conference's thrust into .NET with nary a session discussing ArcObjects issues. I had a hard time following stuff.
Anyway, James agreed that there is going to be a significant market that still uses VB6 for a while, but I noted in the comments that many people are chiding us VB6 users, saying that we all need to move on or be left behind to dwell with the 'saurs.

I'm actually pretty resolved that I'll need to upgrade my programming knowledge. But as someone coming from the Geography side of life, as opposed to a programmer that got dropped into the GIS world, learning new programming languages isn't something that comes as easily for me. And I'm sure I'm not alone there. I started my career with my geography degree editing data and performing geo-analysis. Programming AML was simple enough. Learning VB was only part of my job, but VB isn't that difficult of a language to understand.