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MSN Virtual Earth Revealed
jeremyw writes "A day before its official launch, MSN Virtual Earth has gone live. MSN appears to have been inspired by Google Maps in this combination of local search and mapping. Virtual Earth introduces a number of interface enhancements to the now-familiar draggable aerial web map, such as the ability to zoom in using your mouse scroll wheel, and a Location Finder to determine your location to determine your real-world location "using Wi-Fi technology." Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble claims the site may not perform at full capacity until Monday."
I hope Microsoft has their virtual earth rotating in the right direction this time.
I tried to link to the original Knowledge Base entry for this, alas, it doesn't seem to be there any more.
NBC made that goof in the early '80s. They had a rotating earth in the intro sequence for their evening news broadcast, except it was rotating the wrong way. It was left this way for quite some time, too.
Would you prefer that google had no competition? Competition can be a powerful drive to improvement, after all.
I think it's rather obvious that the creative type who comes up with the ideas usually prevails over those trying to play catch up.
I don't think that's obvious at all. It's perfectly possible to take someone else's idea, improve upon it, and produce a superior product. After all, they've just done most of the hard work and expensive R&D for you.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Ironically, a few years ago, I put up some satellite photos of my house in Colorado ... and the Virtual Earth has the same ones clearly showing the drought of 2002 with a bunch of brown grass - not realistic to expect real-time imagery, but I'm surprised not a more recent pass.
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The only thing they "copied" was the dragability.
Um, they copied a lot more than that. They copied resizing the map window to fill up the browser window.They copied the general color scheme. They copied the ability to switch between street maps and aerial photos. They copied DHTML layering to show point data on top of the maps. They copied the entire design for searching, navigating, and finding points-of-interest. And they copied it so closely, they made it cross-browser functional (you can damn well bet if Google Maps didn't exist as a cross-browser functional product, MSN VE would only work on IE).
And they copied the most innovative part of Google maps - tile-based pre-built raster images to assemble dynamic maps. As someone who has developed GIS applications, I can tell you, while this may sound trivial, it is not. Google thought outside the box. The GIS community for years has used vector data to produce one raster image on-the-fly at runtime (like Mapquest). Instead, Google creates small tiled images at every zoom-level they offer and stores them on the server, and thus can produce a map at any location and any zoom-level, and offer it with "dragability". This is a completely new paradigm for interactive GIS apps. The old way does offer some advantages over the new way, but for web-based interactive GIS, the new way is pretty phenominal.
While the rest of the GIS community was happily working to make incremental improvements to the old paradigm, Google innovated a new paradigm. MSN just copied it. There's nothing wrong with copying (well, until the USPTO grants software patents), but don't mistake it for anything other than what it is.