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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.
Oh. Wait.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
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!!!
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."
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.
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.
Only if Google stop making their map crapper.
They still use the wrong colours for UK roads. Orange, orange and yellow-orange is not a good colour scheme.
The new map interace is slow. I can't just click a "from" and a "to". I have to find the place I want to go.
Microsoft has been very succesful in their attempts to innovate, once you realize that Microsoft has its own private dictionary, and in that dictionary the definition of "innovate" is "extinguish".
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Well, they came up with the XBox, and established online gaming as a serious thing. The Zune HD was apparently really good, but nobody bought it. MS came up with a completely new UI. Everyone complained and bitched because they removed the "start" menu (which incidentally was another MS innovation).
So they do innovate, but slashdotters ignore it or hate them for it.
Damn right about Google. Their maps' legibility have fallen dramatically since their last iteration. When I open my local area, the names of roads, lanes, paths, woods, ponds and lots of other cartographic noise are visible, but whole towns and villages are missing. Only one or two villages are visible out of the 20-30 in the area and these are in a lighter font than the damn 10 hectare wood/pond/back-lane next to it. On top of this, odd places are highlighted (far more prominent) even when logged out. I've no idea why the name of a farm business 5 miles away is more important than the 3 000 people living anonymously in the unlabelled village next to it.
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.
Mappoint did a lot more than Bing does... And the VPs who think Bing is the answer have no idea.
Mappoint is closer to ArcGIS than it is a consumer mapping applications. It had an extensive set of APIs that you could allow apps to push data onto maps, it allowed statistical queries and it allowed complex boundaries. etc... all back in 2004. Heck, they even had some traffic data built in for their analysis.
I remember when Verizon used on-site Mappoint servers to allow dispatchers to use Verizon phones as tacklers (this was before smartphones), so dispatchers could see where certain trucks were, directions they were going, etc.
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".