| Saturday, September 27, 2008 |
07:37 - I love the smell of competition in the morning
http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2008/09/new_virtual_earth_with_3d_clouds.htm
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Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth are engaged in a full-on battle royale for geo-geeks' eyeballs—but not, apparently, their money, because both are free.
Google Earth boasts a much larger customer base and community of interactive users who contribute placemarks and other content; they've also got an apparent edge in 3D building generation (thanks to Google StreetView), and controllable sun placement and lighting now in version 4.3. Not to mention the KML format trump card, a community of open scriptability tying in to Google Maps, and good old-fashioned mindshare (hell, "googlearth" is on the way to being the next "kleenex" or "podcast", much to any competitor's chagrin).
But Virtual Earth has 3D cities that look just about as good, equally detailed ground maps, the same SpaceNavigator support, and a few tricks up its sleeve that Google Earth doesn't—namely some friggin' awesome-looking clouds (inherited from MS Flight Simulator's cloud engine) that put Google Earth's lame 2D cloud layer (itself still new in 4.3) to shame.
Go watch the video. It's stunning stuff.
Commenter Duncan also notes:
One thing that really amazes me: all of Miami is fully populated with trees in Virtual Earth. It is not random trees, but 3D trees in the correct locations. It must be an automated technique, but it works pretty well. One interesting thing is that it adjusts for tree size, but frequently confuses the type( no doubt hard to get right). Palms are sometimes replaced with skinny poplars, etc, but it often gets it right. I haven't seen the trees anywhere else yet.
That's another big win for Microsoft, one that Google's going to have to play ketchup on—along, of course, with improving their clouds, for which they've really got their work cut out for them.
Another commenter says:
i love to where technology is going, between competition, this is going to a fantasy.
Indeed. It's a good thing both these companies are intimately familiar with the potential rewards of not ignoring a market just because it doesn't pay anything for your product; if the browser wars have taught us nothing else, it's that if people are willing to be a captive audience for you, don't do anything to dissuade them, and for God's sake don't stand by and let some competitor come and steal them.
Even better: this time around, Microsoft has no home-field advantage, because they're not able to give their product an unfair leg-up by bundling it (at least not yet), so they have to actually make the product better. And this isn't the web we're talking about; there's no massive corpus of uncontrolled content out there to render and split up through inconsistent standards compliance; the two programs are separate entities with isolated but similar bodies of data to present, and never the twain shall meet. It's truly a choice of preference.
As a Mac user my personal choice is by necessity still Google Earth—but if Google is forced to improve it in response to Microsoft's encroachment, then I'll inherit those improvements in due time. Which judging by the pace of this technological arms race won't be long at all.
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Brian Tiemann
