3 ms·

Well we have SpaceX now... and Microsoft is a trillion dollar company. Launch some satellites.

• delusional 5y ago
  The highest quality aerial photography of my country (Denmark) is taken from planes, not satellites.
  • hyperionplays 5y ago
    Same for Australia. NearMap is mostly plane (and hot air balloon) images for the high quality stuff.
    • astrange 5y ago
      Bing actually has the highest quality aerial images of Australia in some places, licensed from Vexcel. Meanwhile nobody has a good 3D map of Brisbane - Apple has none, Google’s is labeled (c) 2021 but is inexplicably actually from 2010 or so.
  • frosted-flakes 5y ago
    "Satellite" imagery on Google Maps is a misnomer, and when it launched there was a big disagreement on the name that got brought all the way to Larry and Sergey. At the end of the meeting one of them said "call it Bird Mode", but the devs ignored that and stuck with "satellite" because they though bird mode was silly. More details in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569 https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569
    • jhgb 5y ago
      If you look at for example mapy.cz, they call it "Aerial map".
• ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  They owned Vexcel for some years: In 2006, Vexcel Imaging was acquired by Microsoft Corporation and contributed as a subsidiary to the success of Microsoft’s Bing program by pushing the envelope of photogrammetric hardware and software technology with innovations that underpinned the Bing Maps web service and mapping platform. https://www.vexcel-imaging.com/company/ https://www.vexcel-imaging.com/company/