Bing used to have better maps data than Google. Birds Eye was really cool. It was a brief window when it was better. MS Research had a project that was basically streetview before streetview existed. ~2010, there was a whole platform within bing maps for applications to integrate. One of them had photosynth, which made reconstructed, explorable models available within the map, long before integrated mesh became a standard mapping feature.

There was lots of cool stuff available, but that whole org was held back by, I assume, internal politics. It was so bad that Azure Maps, another Microsoft product, doesn’t even use Bing data (or at least didn’t when it was announced and last I checked). Very sad.

All speculation, but I bet they screwed themselves on licensing.

Google put a ton of money into acquiring mapping visuals themselves, as did apple. Microsoft simply licensed the hell out of it.

When Google was ready, they were able to sell their mapping solution. Microsoft, on the other hand, was short sighted and only copying Google.

Another example of Microsoft playing copycat to Google, and having it pay off poorly in the long term is bing411: Google launched goog411 to gather voice data, Microsoft spent a ton of money and copied and used their top tier voice recognition service. Google shut down goog411 not long after: it was never about offering a service.

Microsoft was involved with satellite imagery back in the 90’s, so I don’t see how they could have been copying Google.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research_Maps

I'm not saying they were copying the concept of sattelite imagery, but rather they were late to the business model of maps-as-a-service. And thus, significant components of their modern (after usgs) imagery had licensing terms onerous to competing with Google.

Also, it's not just satellite imagery, but street view. I'm referring to the google strategy of selling the maps as a service, something that microsoft took a while to catch up on.

> involved with satellite imagery back in the 90’s

Yes, they partnered with the USGS to distribute already collected map imagery. They didn't, for example, purchase/build a whole fleet of imaging cars and planes like Google did.

Also, because google had their eyes on a different prize than microsoft, the licensing terms of the map imagery had language baked in around reselling.

My dad hooked up a GPS to his laptop with a serial port and successfully used it with Microsoft Streets as perhaps one of the first car GPS navigation systems, maybe back in 2000 or so. MS bought Streets in 1994, four years before Google was founded. They dropped the ball with maps.

Fyi, first GPS navigation system fitted to a production car came in 1990:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_navigation_system

MS streets and trips was available at OfficeMax for $50, though.

We used that suction cup attached blue LED USB GPS receiver and a laptop for war driving, so much fun.

I did something like this around 1999 to do house hunting in Boston area. Didn't actually work that well for me though.

One thing in particular that's really stupid for a flightsim is that it lacks military and dual-use airports in the Netherlands. So major passenger airports like Eindhoven (probably the #2 nationally) don't exist at all because there's a few F-16s based there too. Even the aerial photos have been edited to resemble a farm. It's so dumb.

I think it's because Bing still blurs those too. It's not been required by law for over 10 years and Google doesn't do so. But bing never bothered to fix it.

It's just really stupid when going for a high fidelity sim and then leaving major airports out.

Ps: sorry for being so outspoken but I just don't understand how it makes sense to leave so many airports out. FSX never did that, X-plane doesn't and even other mapping services don't.

It's also held back by MS exclusivity policies and shit cloud gaming. I'd love to buy it and play it, but it's not on GeForce Now or Stadia, where i play heavy games. I saw it was supposed to be on XCloud whatever the name today is for their Xbox as a service service, signed up for it, and not only is it not there, the whole service and everything around it is a steaming pile of garbage. The UX is terrible, latencies atrocious, etc. Just getting to the correct page listing the games is a fight, since half the links result in 404s ( I don't know if it's just the multiple rebrands or the fact that I'm physically in France but use English as main browser language, but neither should be that problematic for a company the size of Microsoft).

Such a game ( heavy resource consumption, lots of data to continuously update) is perfect for cloud gaming.

I tried Xbox Cloud Gaming and it works somewhat great. So I want to play MSFS for reasons that you wrote, but it's not exist on cloud gaming despite it's available download for free for Xbox subscriber.

MSFS downloader and download server is the worst one I have ever used. I got just below 1MB/s for downloading required 200GB assets, while I can download 80MB/s from Stream. I gave up to play. It connects very far away server, and maybe no duplexing. Developers, do you know Azure?