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Microsoft Invented Google Earth in the 90s, Then Blew It
- HillaryBriss 11y agoSQL Server Rocks!
- lhecker 11y agoWhenever I read stories like this about Microsoft I have to chuckle about all the similarities to Aperture-Science from Portal 2...
- ics 11y agoHeh, I remember TerraServer. It was pretty amazing to me at the time (late '90s), the first thing I did was find my grandparents' property and sure enough saw a few shadowy figures which might as well have been me with them and the dog given the date on the tile. When Google Maps (and maybe MapQuest too?) started doing maps in color I was a suitably impressed kid.
- 13of40 11y agoI use Google Earth almost daily, and they've never made a penny off of me. It doesn't even have in-app ads. I guess these days "Totally Blew It" means "Wisely decided not to spend the next two decades hemorrhaging money on the thing."
- fizzbatter 11y agoSo you think Google has been needlessly hemorrhaging money for two decades? Seems like an odd statement. Clearly Google sees the value in it. Even if it is simply brand identity, or "vendor lockin" (for lack of a better description). Clearly there is something that is very meaningful to Google to do it. I bet there are a ton of companies that would love to have their maps product as the "maps app" of choice by the masses. Likewise, i'm sure Microsoft would love if i had to login to bing every time i used Navigation, compared to me never using bing for anything ever. So yea, i don't think "Totally Blew It" is that far off the mark.
- johansch 11y agoTo list just one value: Google maps is a very strong reason why Android device manufacturers feel like they need to go with a Google-service model and follow Google's requirements, rather than do it Amazon Fire style. This alone is worth billions in search revenue. (And Google was smart enough to let it take a decade for this value to materialize.)
- 13of40 11y agoNo, Google Earth has.
- j_m_b 11y agoCharging for the Google Maps API calls is probably where they make money off of it. Lots of apps use it.
- encoderer 11y agoAnd prolific users pay millions/yr for it.
- mentos 11y agoI completely forgot about the response to aerial photography when it first came out. I remember having some concerns about the privacy implications and feeling 'exposed' on the internet that anyone could see my home. Funny how much my mindset has changed.
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- eli 11y agoI'm having a hard time understanding your example. That someone who knows what your car looks like and roughly where you live could use Google Maps to find the specific address?
- jbuzbee 11y agoOf course I grew up in a time when everybody's name, address and phone number were published in phone books that were widely distributed. I remember it was unusual to have your phone number "unlisted". And the phone company charged extra to leave your information out!
- nashashmi 11y agoWhen people walk the streets, their faces are blurred. But if I know them, I can identify them too. Their shape makes it apparent.
- rasz_pl 11y ago>say somebody was looking for me street view is one of favourite tools technically literate repo men use to locate collateral https://www.youtube.com/user/RepoNut/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/RepoNut/videos
- eterm 11y agoExcept if you look at the screenshots, there's no information. That's the key thing with google maps or google earth, it's the information around what you're looking at that is important, and google understood that.
- rwmj 11y agoI used this and it was incredibly slow. Clicking the arrow buttons moved the map by a fixed amount. In my opinion the breakthrough of Google Maps was the Javascript interface that let you slide around and zoom in and out, plus the engineering behind it that served the map tiles quickly.
- joezydeco 11y agoI used it too and, indeed, it was slow - but I was also using it on a Pentium 90 CPU and a 28.8kbit/sec internet connection. I don't know if gMaps would have run any faster on that hardware back then, especially if it was all jscript-driven.
- rev_bird 11y ago>especially if it was all jscript-driven This is going to reveal an embarrassing lack of historical context, but could Google Maps have run in the Javascript of the '90s? Has the language changed significantly since then, or do we just... use it for everything now?
- ksherlock 11y agoJScript was introduced with IE 3 (1996) Dynamic HTML (modifying the page with javascript) was introduced with IE 4 (1997) iframes were introduced with HTML 4 (1998) I think. XMLHttpRequest was introduced with IE 5 (1999) So 1998 era, maybe, but Javascript had a reputation as being slow and buggy. Flash, Java applets, and even active X were more acceptable technology at the time. (Not trying to dismiss Netscape in my timeline -- I wrote it with respect to Microsoft implementing it.)
- Retric 11y agoClassic embrace, extend, extinguish, JScript(1996) was like JavaScript(1995), but a little late and not quite the same thing. Which made JavaScript seem a lot more buggy than it was because MS implemented something just a little different.
- brwnll 11y ago"According to a USA Today article from June 22, 1998, the initial plan with Terraserver was to list every single transaction in the history of the New York Stock Exchange online and make it searchable. But that was only a half terabyte of data. Microsoft needed something larger." I'd be curious to see what the size of that collection is now, post advent of high frequency trading. Side note, the article in no way explains why Google Earth would be considered a success story. The lead engineer from this project went on to Bing Maps, it's not as if MS decided geographic data wasn't worth doing.
- consz 11y agoThe US equity market does about 4b in transactions a day; let's say the average trade size is $1000 dollars (probably an aggressive estimate; I'd expect it actually to be higher), and you record the ticker (4bytes) + price(8) + quantity(8) for all the transactions, you'd get -- (4+8+8)(4e9/1000) 252 (trading days) / 1e9 = 20GB/year lets say you have these for 100 years, you'd still only have 2TB. And this if for the entire US equity market -- NYSE is only one of 11 protected exchanges (and only trades tape A), so the above estimates are pretty optimistic. Now, if you wanted to record every message and not just every transaction, then you get into serious data (on the order of ~2-5TB/day).
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoThey invented Google Earth, yes, but looking at satellite images is mostly a novelty unless you're searching for concentration camps in North Korea or nuclear plants in Israel. Google Maps is a much more generally useful product. And Microsoft was well ahead of Google, they sold numerous offline mapping products.
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- webaholic 11y agoHow I wish MSFT executives were more competitive and less dismissive of non-OS related technologies back in the day. I am really glad that things are quite different today and they are -atleast- competing with other tech companies if not leading them.
- nashashmi 11y agoI wish they were more open to let the whole world use the standards they set. MS was an amazing platform company they set some of the greatest standards we have come to known. It is sad to see those standards hit the dust in the face of more inviting technologies.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- EA 11y agoAFAIK, Microsoft used public (US Government) imagery. Google bought Keyhole and that enabled them to own the sensors which gave them more power in terms of capturing content.
- frik 11y agoThe TerraServer project split into two branches, read both Wikipedia pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraServer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraServer Also NASA World Wind got popular, just before Google Earth, and was initially more advanced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_World_Wind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_World_Wind
- ghshephard 11y agoImportant to note that there were a lot of mapping companies in the 90s/early 2000s, but the breakthroughs were really Google acquiring a number of mapping companies like Keyhole, where2. The big leap forward, of course, was the hyper responsive Ajax interface that google introduced around 2004.
- johansch 11y agoYeah. The seamless "scrolling a map in a browser thing" blew everyone's mind. It did a lot in cementing the image of Google as a visionary company.
- jbuzbee 11y agoOh yeah. I remember when Google Maps first came out. Nobody thought that this degree of interactivity was even feasible in a browser. It was really revolutionary.
- sopooneo 11y agoYup. And originally done with a 1 pixel iframe rather than the XMLHttpRequest method if I remember correctly.
- nashashmi 11y agorevolutionary ... The emergence and craze of AJAX blew everyone away after that point. People realized there was a thing called XMLHTTPrequest. That technology had been my dream ever since I learned HTML. The tech came out in 1996 by Microsoft and nobody used it until 2003. At this time, Firefox took the torch of keeping the web moving forward. So a whole buzz around web tech reignited. Those were my days of inspiration.
- pvg 11y agoYou're probably off by a few years there and, of course, Microsoft used it for their browser-based Outlook client. One could write a similarly wrong-headed article about how Microsoft invented Gmail.
- BorisMelnik 11y agoI remember using this on my first 486, maybe a 386 on a CD that came bundled with Microsoft Encarta. This was just a hair before the internet started taking off on modems and such, I beleive we might have had an internet connection but it was still at the point where sharing floppy's and CD's were the best way to share software.
- jbuzbee 11y agoMicrosoft invented it? I recall working on a digital mapping system in the late 80's that was very similar. We had a very large drum scanner that we used to scan paper maps and imagery at various scales. First we'd rectify the result, then we'd do a color reduction to both cut down the file size and to match the capabilities of the machines of the day. Next we'd slice the image up into 128x128 pixel tiles and assemble the result into a database of various scales that allowed a user to zoom, pan from map to map, overlay symbology, etc. At the time we were working with 300 MB drives, so we were very restricted and had to create specific databases that matched a user's need.
- vog 11y agoThat's very interesting. How was the digital mapping system named? Which company did you work for? Who were the customers?
- jbuzbee 11y agoI named it. I called it the "Digital Application Map Manager" or DAMM. That way my boss had to ask "When will those DAMM maps be ready?". We had a sub-contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory but the ultimate customer was the US Army.
- simonebrunozzi 11y agoGenius. :)
- javajosh 11y agoHaving worked on one or two SIBR proposals, I appreciate a good (mis)use of the government's perverse acronym fetish. Bravo!
- meddlepal 11y agoI had a professor who worked on an IBM research project back in the late 80's to build something like Google Earth and Maps. He also made some important contributions to GIS development and research. So yea... I don't think Microsoft invented it by a long stretch.
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- pierotofy 11y agoIf you're interested in developing virtual globe applications, take a look at http://cesiumjs.org http://cesiumjs.org
- pcunite 11y agoWow, I had totally forgotten about Terra server. I remember this now.
- varelse 11y agoThey're not the only ones apparently: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/origination-of-google-earth-focus-of-patent-infringement-lawsuit-by-artcom-innovationpool-246345841.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/origination-of-googl...
- spilk 11y agoHeck, Google didn't even invent Google Earth, they bought a company named Keyhole and renamed it.
- carbocation 11y agoThis headline is pernicious clickbait. Why not say "Microsoft Invented a Google Earth precursor, but never took it seriously"? Because that would not force you to click through to understand how they "totally blew it." Spoiler alert: They built TeraServer map service to demonstrate that their database product could handle a terabyte or more of data. They got tons of user interest, but didn't use the information they got from searches or the user emails to iterate on their project. They could have developed a dominant mapping service (the author's thesis, sort of), but they let the project languish.
- juhq 11y agoI remember that good old around year 2000 Microsoft web design playing with them fonts and such. Ah, good memories!
- redml 11y agoMicrosoft's focus in the 90s was to kill Netscape, they never had a grand vision for the internet.
- bambax 11y ago> Microsoft, the corporation, didn't seem to care very little about... Very much.
- JonFish85 11y agoI almost feel bad for Microsoft. I think they were far ahead of their time in many ways, and ended up getting in trouble for it. They had some pretty cool tablets, but unfortunately the hardware / internet infrastructure wasn't really there to support it. They were the first (major at least) to build an OS underpinned by a browser. They were early to the game of running a real OS on a phone. Unfortunately they weren't really able to take advantage of those. They seem slow to get into the tablet game the 2nd time around, and even now they're still playing catch-up (although I've heard the Surface things are pretty good). Their phones are consistently underachieving for whatever reason. They're still struggling to find the right model for Windows ever since XP/7 (I think they've finally gotten on board with the Apple model of the OS is freely updatable, but I'm not 100% sure of that). They've done some great work, but man, they can't seem to get out of their own way sometimes.
- ChrisNorstrom 11y agoFun Fact: Microsoft had Instant IMAGE Search over 10 years ago when they launched the live.com product (if anyone remembers). Much much before google had instant web search. Start typing and images would instantly fill the screen. This was at a time when AJAX was getting popular. Like a lot of cool Microsoft tech, they didn't invest in it for the long run and just killed it along with EXPO, the craigslist competitor.
- X-Factor 11y agoSimilarly, The first pc user interface was created in Xerox Labs, But Apple was the first realizing its importance.
- superkuh 11y agoI used terraserver to manually download the entire tile set for my town (right click, save as). Then I laboriously used Photoshop 5 to align and remove the watermarks. It took an entire week but by the end I had a clean ~150 MB jpg that I could scroll around in as needed.
- sammydavis 11y agoI am sure there were other things like this kicking around at the time as people have been discussing. I worked on improving the performance of the terraserver project a little bit. I was part of the team that designed and wrote sql server 7.0 (a db rewrite from scratch of the purchased sybase, including parser, optimizer, QE, storage engine, but keeping the stored procedure programming language that was from sybase). I believe this was 1998. We all knew it was a pretty impressive combination of maps, jpeg image, software and web browsers. Microsoft definitely had an idea that they didn't want to make the web too great, because that could lessen the importance of windows. As others say, Microsoft didn't know what they had with ajax. I remember this was one of the first, early, high query examples we had, other than tpcc and tpcd. There was a stored procedure call in the application that accidentally lead to basically a lock that was held, blocking everything else. That was a really hard problem to figure out.
- yaymicrosoft 11y agoMicrosoft Invented Google Chrome in the 90s, Then Blew It.. Eleven times.
- benkant 11y agoWe were writing web based GIS in 1996, using ESRI's MapObjects IMS. Tiling, projections, yes these were solved problems by then using available commercial software. We were storing data in Oracle or DB/2 with ESRI's SDE sitting on top, because at that time no mainstream RDBMS had spatial types. I don't recall if SDE supported SQL Server back then. That aside, you could have built TerraServer with COTS tech in 1997. TerraServer was impressive due to being publically available. Nothing we built at the time was available to the public as far as I remember. But it existed. And that's just web based stuff, which really is the easy part. Large scale GIS had been around for decades prior.