Comments on: Microsoft launch Virtual Earth

By: Fintan

Fintan — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 11:26:39 +0000

over in time i wouldnt be suprised it will say best viewed in Internet Explorer

By: Tom Raftery’s I.T. views » Blog Archive » Microsoft Virtual Earth vs Google Maps

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 10:15:42 +0000

[...] After a couple of initial hiccups in the launch, the application is now live. [...]

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 09:49:16 +0000

Hi Lee,

I used it this morning and couldn’t find anywhere in Ireland on it – plus i couldn’t get it to work in Firefox on the Mac – also, the Google Maps search for a US address works far better than the MSN one as far as I can see – I’ll be posting on this in a sec!

I am surprised that MS didn’t use AJAX for images – it would have worked far better than the image resize.

Tom

By: hostyle

hostyle — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 08:27:39 +0000

I used it for a short time yesterday. There is nowhere near the amount of map detail as google maps (for non-US city maps that is), and their aerial view has yet to work for me. Too little, too late IMO. I was pleasantly shocked and surprised that it works in non-MS browsers. There a few annoying bugs – the main one being that you can’t double click on an image that hasn’t loaded (which seems to happen a lot) and thus can’t zoom in on that area of the map using that method. Their zoom trick is also a bit lame (old school image resize, followed by a blank screen) as it should ideally preload the next set of images while you’re waiting, and not give you a blank screen.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:28:51 +0000

Steve,

thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment – as I said over on Scoble’s blog though, I find it hard to believe that a company who purports to care about its customers would put up a beta site and then intentionally take it down leaving nothing but a timeout (i.e. no explanation) for unwitting customers who come subsequently.

By: Steve Lombardi

Steve Lombardi — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:05:56 +0000

Tom Said: “Microsoft have apparently launched… ”

No! actually, as I just posted back on our team blog, we certainly have NOT launched the Beta release of Virtual Earth. And no, this isn’t an unplanned outage of service, yestderday was more like an unplanned uppage for testing The site will be online sometime tomorrow as planned for everyone to party on.

til then,

Steve Lombardi