More on New Virtual Earth/Live Local Imagery Update
I’ve gotten a couple emails from people insisting that I’m wrong and Virtual Earth is the most impressive online mapping service available. My point was not that the update wasn’t good for some people, just that you have to take these updates with a grain of salt. I mean who cares that you can see some ferris wheel in the UK if you still have crappy imagery in major metropolitan areas?
It is good marketing to prove zoom into an interesting area and show off the great update, but if the majority of the product is still way behind the curve then why waste money on making a ferris wheel crisp? I don’t really care that Phoenix doesn’t have the birds eye view, but without timely imagery why would I use Virtual Earth in any product? (They can’t even spell Veterans Way correctly in the example above next to my office)
I do love the navigation of Virtual Earth vs Google or any other mapping product, but I didn’t use VE before this update and I’m sure not going to use it after. What sucks is even NASA World Wind is behind Google Earth in Phoenix so I’ve put that aside also.
James,
I’ve got my favorites as well but I always like to remind myself that it is great to have the GIS options that we do today and the competition will only make things betters. Exciting times in the GIS world, wouldn’t you say?
Randy
I mean who cares that you can see some ferris wheel in the UK if you still have crappy imagery in major metropolitan areas?
It’s not really surprising James… simple metrics. How many people live in London, how many people visit London, how many people just browsing may look at London? Answer those questions then compare them to the Phoenix area. So if you have limited resources (yes… even MS has limited resources) where do you prioritize? Interestingly it appears that MS approach is more focused on quality as apposed to just sheer resolution. In my mind its a good way to differentiate themselves from other services.
All of that being said.. I’m in the same boat as you. I don’t get hi-res where via VE. Google has the hi-res, but the image isn’t geo-rectified properly! ESRI doesn’t cut it either. My fav is still Yahoo beta version. It has, by far, the best imagery of the bunch but the hybrid version doesn’t seem to be available. That’s my $0.02 CDN (which these days is actually almost $0.02 USD)
How many people live in Phoenix area vs London? 3.8 Million vs 7.5 million. Sure that is about half the population, but that doesn’t mean that Phoenix isn’t a large area with a large population. How many people visit Phoenix vs London? Can’t give you stats on that, but Phoenix is a huge tourist destination (with a direct flight to London so its not like London folk don’t want to know about Phoenix).
I don’t give Microsoft fault on the quality, but quantity is just as important with a web mapping application. If we were talking about a smaller city such as Tucson I’d buy the argument that Tucson isn’t as important as London, but you’d think you could get coverage of the 5th largest city in the largest independent economy of the world. If you can’t get that right then what is the point.
Hi James,
I’m a long-time lurker, but I thought I’d weigh in. What I want from a web-based mapping application is information usually in the form of plain maps. I think most users of these services aren’t trying to look at pretty pictures. However, there is obviously a bunch of users that want to do just that. For these users I think that the poor quality of the Microsoft black and white images just won’t cut it considering offerings from Google.
But what I have noticed in terms of actually interesting Geographic data aside from pretty pictures, VE has Google beat on the international scale: road and city data for places like the Asia, Africa and South America are non-existent in Google maps.
Example:
http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=14.552837~-87.852803&style=r&lvl=8&sp=aN.pk3t4p5p4wct_502%2520S%2520College%2520Ave%252c%2520Tempe%252c%2520AZ%252085281%252c%2520United%2520States___
http://maps.google.com/?ll=15.792254,-88.637695&spn=7.743387,10.305176&om=1
Daanish
Dannish raises a good point on worldwide data sets. MS certainly has everyone else beat on this, but its ‘Gee… wow!” factor is pretty low. I will also point out the cartographic quality of the MS road maps are outstanding. This is really where I thought the ESRI would be much better, but I have been quite disappointed. As always beauty is in the eye of the beholder… your milage may vary.
Compare:
VE
GM
Hi James,
I live in the UK so I lve this addition, I can finaly see my house without going outside
I’m not sure ifyou know already but you can see VE data from within World Wind using this plug-in by Casey Chesnut, its still a bit buggy right now so consider it a beta, Microsoft were very kind to let us make this plug-in, unlike google who threatened to sue us for making a similar plug-in or google maps data. http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/Add-on:Virtual_Earth
sorry for the spelling mistakes I must be tired.
Bull, I’m glad Microsoft allows you to use the data and I think that shows that they aren’t the “evil empire” all the time, but they need to fill in some gaps in the United States before I’ll use it full time.
I know you are all feeling very sad for me given the lack of support you’ve had around the world, but I can’t for the life of me understand the logic behind not supporting such a large city as Phoenix.
A rather narrow mindset James…
“I mean who cares that you can see some ferris wheel in the UK if you still have crappy imagery in major metropolitan areas?”
Since when has London not been a major metropolitan area? Is there anything to see in Phoenix, isn’t it just sand and rednecks out there in the desert?
Xav, read my comments because you obviously didn’t see that I said London is a major metropolitan area.
Oh and personal attacks are not welcome in my comments so knock it off.
Hi James – Apologies for taking so long to jump on this thread. It’s been a terribly busy week here! A lot of users tell us that there are things more important in an online mapping system than aerial Imagery. we spend a lot of time in usability studies and polling users, and rarely is ortho imagery at the top of the mind of the average net surfer. Sure, GIS blogs spend lots of time comparing imagery, but if we tuned our product based exclusively on bloggers input, WLL would probably require a 3gigP4 and a Radeon crossfire
The things our users have been asking for include maps and geocoding Internationally (number 1 by a landslide. See Daanish’s comment above as an example of typical feedback), trip planning, ability to correct bad geocodes, ability to add their own content to maps and printing improvements. Not surprisingly, in this release we added features like Real Time Traffic Overlays, the ability to move algorithmically geocoded pushpins, and Collections which allows someone to build their own layer of points to share with others. Our new Print menu isn’t gonna get us a lot of coverage in hardcore GIS blogs, but its features like that that users need to complete the tasks they actually want to do at WLL.
Here’s a bit of insight into usage patterns of online mapping users. When we add 6 inch per pixel imagery for a region, our usage logs show a gigantic spike in traffic (Wow! Look at my house!) then a gradual return to previous levels. When we add features like Collections and Traffic (and good ole street maps for a region that previously wasn’t covered), we see the same giant leap in usage, but it is suddenly sustained usage that doesn’t drop back off. This tells us that our web visitors need to do mundane everyday tasks like creating and printing a custom list of garage sales they want to hit Saturday a lot more often than they look at the roof of their house. The point isn’t that Aerial imagery isn’t important or a Priority here on the Virtual Earth team, just not at the cost of all other features. In fact, we continue to invest very heavily in aerial image acquisition and publishing.
Regards,
Steve Lombardi
Virtual Earth Program Manager
stevelom {a ) microsoft d ot com
Nice to see you guys keeping up with these blogs, and thanks for allowing the VE pluin for World Wind, my opinion of microsoft has gone up a great deal recently.
I’ve been told that Microsoft uses the statistics from http://www.msn.com to decide where to upgrade their datasets. So if there for instance are more people from London visiting MSN than from Phoenix, this is where they will try to get good data first. I guess it comes down to the number of adds you can sell, which then comes down to the number of users you can attract. You’ll just have to go visit MSN some more I guess
Pete, by that logic then less people from Phoenix will come because there aren’t any good datasets. We’ll just use Ask, Yahoo, Google.
Although the prioritization of which geographies to focus on for aerial imagery is more complex than what Pete suggests in his comment above, traffic on MSN (it’s geographic origin) is certainly a big factor. But James, while your logic is sound (less people will visit WLL from Phoenix), the *percent* of people from Phoenix that will use a competing online mapping portal because they don’t like the aerial imagery at WLL is really really tiny. If WLL offers them other features like address correction and enhanced printing that they value more and use more than ortho imagery, they will use WLL for these benefits. I have reams of boring log files that seem to back this up, and dumped some of that data into MapPoint 2004 for Analysis. This first map is straight up population by state:
http://tk.files.storage.msn.com/x1pnp_rgmi5o515QqLrqb_S_-2NamzsC9T7S8Zb4RQGx9OesXTjZjuS6K1zvD_fJ0m50oZJo7B88LJXgQ6zCe3-mVtDvChyJGDDF3BgU6nxbKwfoTLdz2atVKJ0t5-1dNemJcQMp04ftCQ
and here is 30 days of traffic at WLL mapped by state:
http://tk.files.storage.msn.com/x1pnp_rgmi5o515QqLrqb_S_-2NamzsC9T7n3bpOZE76crKIfhEXWIX8soPYaRTG4yXnNmeIqLRN8yUdJrMBAKGAkt53ggEqyxm0l5vSGC2Vh560OvCSysbyhjmdBaJSSgBdDc2bAz9fvI
you have to look pretty hard to find a difference. the number of visitors to WLL originating in Arizona is very much in proportion to the population of Arizona.
but this is all pretty acedemic. my final point above still holds true. We aren’t satisfied with the quality of our imagery in Phoenix and will continue to work on improving it.
Steve Lombardi
Virtual Earth Program Manager
stevelom {a ) microsoft d ot com
Regarding the “Vetrans Way” misspelling, that’s NAVTEQ’s mistake, not Microsoft’s. Google and Yahoo maps have the exact same misspelling.
Never Microsoft’s fault I guess.
James is right, shame on Microsoft for not getting the largest metopolitain areas in the database. My hometown of Charlotte, NC has good imagery and it isn’t even 1/3 the size of Phoenix.
I was actually looking for imagery of Phoenix/Scottsdale this winter while going on a golf vacation there. Google had what I was looking for. Steve is right, people do want directions and routing, but I used Google because I could see my destinations in color aerials (the golf courses) and not black and white imagery.
Larry, in this case of misspelling a street name, it’s not Microsoft’s fault. Microsoft doesn’t collect its own street data — it licenses that data from NAVTEQ, just like Google and Yahoo do. I was just pointing out that it’s unfair to criticize Microsoft for someone else’s mistake.
That’s not to say that Microsoft doesn’t make mistakes, but this isn’t one of them.
Well at least all the europeans gets a birds eye view of all their cities >50.000:
http://www.blomasa.com/en/news/stock-exchange-notifications/2006-05-24
Some of the images are already on local live.