Microsoft Phasing Out ESP Simulation Platform?

Ian Lamont writes "Overlooked in last month's news about Microsoft laying off the entire Flight Simulator dev team is the news that Microsoft's ESP development team has been gutted as well, and the future of the platform is in doubt. ESP is oriented toward industrial use, and lets companies build 3D simulations for flight and other applications. Late last year Microsoft announced big plans to expand ESP to other verticals, such as real estate, city planning, and law enforcement. That looks increasingly unlikely. Even though Microsoft declined to comment on ESP's future, companies which invested in the product are angry, judging by some of the comments on an MSDN thread. As noted by one user, 'my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform.'"

Comments

Re:X-Plane developers picking up MS customers

[He Who Has No Name]

When X-plane ships 24,000 real-world accurate airports, hi-res DEM and regional terrain textures for the entire globe, 7,000 unique landmark structures and features, full ATC for human and AI traffic, and an SDK that doesn't require the equivalent of native fluency in several extinct languages to use in order to develop commercial-grade dev or art content... ...let me know. ; )

Re:We can't be missing much...

[chebucto]

you'll find this isn't much of an option when you get to industry-specific stuff (with some exceptions).

Hopefully this will be less true in the future. At $1m-2m/license, there's no reason why buyers couldn't set up a consortium and have to have their boutique software written for them and release as free software. The problem of free riders this would create would probably be outweighed by the benefit of knowing the software will stick around.