Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Kills Off MapPoint and Streets and Trips In Favor of Bing Maps
DroidJason1 (3589319) writes Microsoft has killed off two of its mapping products, MapPoint and Streets & Trips. Both of these services have received their last update and will soon be retired in favor of Microsoft's premier mapping product, Bing Maps. The company has yet to go public with a press release announcing the retirement of these two mapping services, but the Redmond giant has quietly mentioned the fate on both the services' websites. MapPoint was first released back in 1999 and made it easier to view, edit, and integrate maps into software. Streets & Trips was a route planning package. Microsoft is now pushing Bing Maps exclusively.
You never know when they will get killed. Same goes for Free Sharepoint, Free Office 365, Free One Drive etc. Get off them and breathe free.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
when they had Microsoft TerraServer running on those sweet DEC Alpha's back in 1998. Instead of launching a new and exciting mapping service, they just settled for a minor showcase for SQL Server 7 with a database greater than 1TB.
Talk about a company with zero vision.
"Microsoft is now pushing Bing Maps exclusively"
...counting down to the eventual outcry over upcoming changes to BING licensing restrictions that will further profit MS
These apps paved the way for Bing.
Oh. Wait.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
This is what corporations are about. But up the smaller successful offerings so people can use your crappier offerings for a price.
Be seeing you...
Maybe it can find its way out of obscurity.
retire Bing and just use Google. Huh? Am I right!
You know what was a really good Microsoft offering, for its time? Microsoft Dinosaurs. And I liked Encarta as well.
The web has largely rendered those sorts of projects pointless from a corporate perspective, obviously. Plus I haven't used Windows as my main desktop OS for 13-14 years.. but still, I have fond memories of those two products.
#DeleteChrome
That's my experience with the company in a nutshell.
Apple already has huge profit margins. Do they really need to save a few more bucks by replacing Chinese workers/slaves with robots?
I guess shareholders' desire for profit at all costs wins out again...
She's not going to be happy about this. Not at all.
Bing maps isn't even a poor second to S&T for route planning. Not even an "also ran".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Why oh why don't they just use Google maps like everyone else? Google maps are awesome! Heck even bong could use Google maps. It would be a whole lot cheaper too! I don't know why microsoft doesn't use Google maps. Google knows how to make maps really well!
I've been using google maps for so long forgot anything else was out there!
I for one had never even heard of these products, and I don't think I've ever encountered a web site using it. All I see is Google Maps when sites need to do something with mapping.
Still use "Dinosaurs". Kids make "life size" dinos or parts by using those diagrams with the scale human and blow them up on a projector to trace on huge art paper and paint / color / decorate. Tough finding a fridge big enough to put them on at home with the rest of the classroom art.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Annoyingly, it's not just Encarta. It's seemingly any offline reference title. Grolier's is paywalled to oblivion, Britannica gives the first two paragraphs, Simon & Schuster haven't sold a reference app in years, and Wikipedia is, well, Wikipedia.
Now yes, the internet is how we get data around fastest, and even CDs were a de facto subscription since you'd buy a copy every year or two to stay current. I get that. Where plastic disc media had some usefulness to it was that, for K-12 schooling, it was easier to cite them as one would cite a traditional printed volume. Additionally, even if not the most bleeding edge information, most information contained therein would remain relatively consistent from year to year (especially ones on historical matters; technological matters, less so for obvious reasons). It also provided a baseline with which to compare other sources. If Encarta and Wikipedia disagreed, it'd pose the question of 'why'. Was there some sort of major breakthrough that allows Wikipedia to show its strengths as being an up-to-the-minute, crowdsourced reference, or is the Wikipedia article amidst an edit war? At least with Encarta, there's some semblance of "information freeze" where it's accurate to the point where the disc was pressed, and can be relied upon as such.
Sending reference works "to the cloud" makes sense, until companies paywall the whole thing, you don't know what you're really getting when you fork over your Mastercard, and it causes people like me to wax nostalgic for the plastic disc for well-written, relatively unbiased descriptions of WWII battles.
I am a retired computer guy, and an RVer. I've used Streets and Trips for the past three years, and have found it invaluable for RV travelling. What makes Streets and Trips work so well for travelers is that it is always there, whether you have Internet or not. And my experience even with a smart phone and hotspot capabilities, is that travellers do not always have access to the Internet. Which renders MS's "Bing" solution useless. And Streets and Trips on my laptop is connected to a printer, so printing out strip maps for the next day is easy. It makes it easy to create long trips, stop by stop, and save the whole route. I'm talking about several months and 10,000 miles of traveling here. I've tried using Google and Bing maps, but actually, the closest trip planning tool I've found that provides for long range planning and in any detail I want is actually Google Earth. But until Streets and Trips is dead, I will be using it. And it sounds like it should work for the next several years.
...perfect for the device which is always on-line.
For my excursions with my laptop, which is not always Internet-connected and sometimes gets taken to places where there is no signal, anyway, Map Point is great.
The Cloud -- The Internet Is Everywhere Even If It Isn't.
I've never really cared for it, in my area it could be taken for type of a cherry, but of little fact. Now MapPoint that is a search engine name. Google not forgotten with a name selected for what can only be called it's prime directive.
Not forgotten is also the daughter of the mathematician who sued to have that word (Google) back in his memory, I'm sorry but it is a good site name). They did your Dad good, take solstice in that.
The fact Google will control the world in a matter of years should add the cherry. The statement is a matter of the Google glasses that can read Pin Numbers.
Bowel Movement
one more to go! Microsoft should just kill all mediocre products and focus on the ones that are great. Oh, wait...
You know what was a really good Microsoft offering, for its time? Microsoft Dinosaurs. And I liked Encarta as well.
Microsoft Dangerous Creatures for the life! Indeed, in general those multimedia CD-ROMs produced by Microsoft were very well executed.
Better get one product right. I really like the driving instructions Bing creates. But they need to match reality more reliably. I don't have the time to double-check with other material.
You are free to download wikipedia and use it locally.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Not sure what you mean here. I just tried a route with Bing, clicked "view route based on traffic" and the route changed to avoid a jam.
They are the boss whenever and whatever they want they can simply kill or remove the services.
http://topeurobets.com/
I think that average english speakers in the United States normally different words to describe what I think you are describing... I am surprised how difficult I found your paragraphs to understand. I think if you changed some words, it would be more understandable to the other people here, and it could still be offensive.
For when you absolutely need to be confused as to how to get there!
:I don't like the word Bing .... I've never really cared for it
Too right. It makes me think of Bing Crosby, the 1950's Brycreemed guy with jug-handle ears who sings that dreary "White Xmas" song on continuous loop in every shopping mall from about mid-October every year. Otherwise it reminds me of a silly children's board game (can't remember what it's called) where you have to shout "Bing!" or "Ping!" or something like that when you think you have won.
Crack open your wallet and spend $300 on this Garmin and you'll have noticed you have less problems, and the voice recognition software gets it right over 90% of the time.
But my company uses streets and trips or delorme to mark out our day, quicker and less messy/confusing then a paper map.
Let me explain, we do dig safe locates, thus every day is different going to 20-40 different locations in a 2-5 city area every day. After a while even erasing those marks on a paper map leave it messy and difficult to tell what an old mark vs new mark is. never mind smudges or dealing with the edge of map areas.
Add in a gps unit to the lap top an d you get a great 'you are here" beacon. helping you determine your route (the route given isn't always right or you just need to go in a different order then the program came up with.
MapPoint had some great data set tools in that went beyond just street routing.
I guess I'll look towards DeLorme or one of the others for my map software needs.
I use S&T for my laptop and like the fact that I don't need an internet connection, can quickly and easily schedule multiple stops, trace my route so I can see where I drove, etc.
That last one is a neat thing that I use to see where I drove in a new city
MapPoint? Wasn't it the service that plotted a route between two cities in Norway by taking the long, two-day and over 1600 mile scenic route, instead of the more direct 500 mile trip it was if going the other way around?
Well, yes it was!
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Lindows.
Winux.
And so on. I can see this happening.
Streets and trips was the one Microsoft product I still used. Guess there's no reason to have those last couple dual boot machines.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
[Microsoft] came up with the XBox, and established online gaming as a serious thing
Xbox Live came out in the fourth quarter of 2002. By that time, EverQuest had already been out for three and a half years. So I must be misunderstanding what you mean by "serious thing".
MS came up with a completely new UI.
If you call At Ease "new".
Everyone complained and bitched because they removed the "start" menu
That's because the new Start screen in Windows 8 was full-screen, completely covering up the windows of the task you're working on and removing any context for an additional application that you're adding to a particular task. In Mac terms, it was like going back from MultiFinder to Switcher or like having At Ease forced on you.
which incidentally was another MS innovation
Nope, that was Kerry Clendinning in 1992. In System 7, Apple made each "desk accessory" run in its own process and stored them in separate files within the Apple Menu items folder instead of resources in the System file. By doing this, Apple turned the Mac's Apple menu into a rudimentary quick launch menu. A third-party extension called MenuChoice allowed the creation of program groups inside the Apple menu, and Apple acquired one of MenuChoice's competitors to incorporate the functionality into System 7.5.
I will eventually need a tool to replace MapPoint that will take an Excel file and put the addresses on a map, draw a radius around a city and re-export the address contain in this radius to a new Excel file. Any suggestion? MapPoint does the mapping by postal code for North America and by city name for other country. This is a great tool!
All these comments and not one mention of OpenStreetMaps: http://www.openstreetmap.org/
I tried those instructions. First, I couldn't even download my entire county;* the error message was "Area too large, zoom in". Second, after I did manage to zoom in on a neighborhood, the resulting map said "Expires in 30 days".
* I said "county" and meant "county", not "country".
Those units are fine for turn-by-turn directions... but there is more to the world of maps than turn-by-turn directions. They're completely useless for advance planning. Google and Bing are moderately useful for advance planning, but don't allow the level of customization that S&T does or the level of annotation that S&T or hardcopy (S&T or 'normal' folding) maps allow.
The GPS doesn't allow annotation, and the Rand McNally atlas is at too large a scale for much useful annotation. Annotations are useful for "this exit has y restaurant" and "that [exit|rest stop] has an RV dump" or "if we're ahead of schedule, that exit has a [geocache|historical marker|whatever else". Sure, much of this is covered in printed gazettes and guides, but being able to annotate it all on a hardcopy strip map makes life so much more convenient because you don't have to look stuff up on the fly. Plus hard copy strip maps don't require a data connection or a battery or remembering which button does what. And unless your traveling companion(s) suffer from severe vision problems... they're always 100% compatible (I.E. no worries about the latest version of the OS, or you have an iPhone while your companion has a 'droid or just plain doesn't understand how to use your software).
As shown above, there's a lot more involved than just turn-by-turn directions and not getting lost. And there are a lot of people who enjoy planning, or who simply must plan in order to meet a schedule or a goal.
I'm not sure what you mean by the requirement that it be "integrated with the rest of the system". If something were to be "integrated with the rest of" a PC, would it need to have shipped as part of what was then the monopoly PC operating system, or would third party matchmaking frameworks count as well? If the former, then due to the applications barrier to entry, Microsoft wins by default for innovation.
All California state officials and unions have agreed to use Map Point for the determination of travel times to and from projects to establish how many hours you get paid en-route to work. It will be interesting to see what they use now. I've used Google Maps for a long time and the union guys will often use that to cause havok for us, a non union shop.