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Except a court decided they didn't. This company didn't have a claim on the idea of 3D visualization of the planet.

• rhacker 5y ago
  By Jury. And at the time Google was a highly popular company. I still think a lot of large companies get away with stealing the candy from others.
  • khazhoux 5y ago
    But Keyhole did not steal anyone's candy. The origin for the product (and I'm paraphrasing the story here, secondhand) was actually SGI'ers had developed a method for efficiently rendering gigantic textures at multiple levels of detail. They looked for the largest texture they could find for their demos, and that turned out to be high-res terrestrial imagery. This demo app then turned into the Keyhole product itself. This technology was developed inside the world's leading computer graphics company, where people spent 24/7 thinking about how to render 3D graphics and textures better, faster, at higher resolutions. And Keyhole was merely a 3d app that happened to be showing the planet. The other company did not have a valid claim against that.