Over the past several weeks, I have spent some time browsing through the various mapping tools freely available on the Internet.  I've been looking at not only those for Planet Earth, but also those for the heavens above.  If I consider only the top three (Google Maps/Earth/Sky, Yahoo Maps and Microsoft Live Earth/WorldWide Telescope), then the first thing that becomes obvious is that Yahoo Maps does not even compete.  It's time to focus on the other two and how their strategies seem to differ.

Over the past several weeks, I have spent some time browsing through the various mapping tools freely available on the Internet.  I've been looking at not only those for Planet Earth, but also those for the heavens above.  If I consider only the top three (Google Maps /Earth /Sky , Yahoo Maps & Microsoft Live Earth & WorldWide Telescope ), then the first thing that becomes obvious is that (in my opinion), Yahoo Maps does not even compete.  It's offering appears to offer the same functionality that Google Maps offered, when it was first released about 3 years ago.  As such, I will only focus on Google and Microsoft's products.  I am well aware of many other mapping and astronomical sites, but the key focus here is to identify the difference in strategies by focusing on these products.

In the left corner...

 ...we have the king of mashups, Google!  Google's vision of "indexing" the world's knowledge has led them to a string of acquisitions and partnerships to create the Google Maps/Earth/Sky suite of applications.  Up till recently, they have focused on partnering with those who have various types of content and "mashing it up" to form new applications, based on that content.  Much of their content is generally, freely available on the internet or within the public domain.  As such, they are not presenting new content, but merely re-rendering it in a user-friendly way.

This approach has obvious advantages in that it allows for rapid development of applications, using already-developed content.  Once the "container" or the mashup is created, a vast amount of content will already be available.  This is an ideal model, that led to Google Earth's and subsequently Google Map's success with users.

In the past year, Google introduced Street Views which allows a user to see a panoramic image of the street they wish to see.  To achieve this, Google outfitted cars with special cameras and GPS units that would drive down these streets to record this data.  It could be argued that this is an acknowledgement that the content on the Internet is not sufficient to satisfy users and it is necessary, therefore, to create your own content.  This obviously extends on Google's original vision.  

In the right corner...

 ...we have the heavyweight, Microsoft.  Having started in desktop operating systems and applications, Microsoft have struggled to adapt their business model to the online space and create an impact on Google's market share.  Furthermore, they have not been considerably innovative in this space.  Instead, (it appears) they have played a "wait-and-see" approach and after Google's success, have launched comparable services.  When adopting this strategy, however, it is important to introduce new, compelling features to lure users away from the incumbent service (in this case, from Google).  It is important to note that Microsoft may have been working on these products long before Google, but as Google was first to market, it is still important for Microsoft to respond with compelling features.

Microsoft Live Earth was launched after Google Maps and initially, was quite limited.  Since then, it has grown to include "Birds Eye" view as well as the typical "Aerial" maps (which are similar to Google's satellite view).  Of particular note, though is the introduction of Live Earth 3D.  Microsoft hired a team of people to create 3D models of whole cities and then integrated that into Live Earth.  When the aerial images are stitched in together with the 3D models of the cities, it creates quite an immersive 3D experience for that city.  Hence, rather than focusing on pre-existing content, Microsoft's approach has been to create content that appears to be a "premium version" of the basic Google offering.

This also becomes apparent when comparing WorldWide Telescope with Google Sky.  While Google Sky has taken images from a variety of sources, WorldWide Telescope has chosen premium images and worked on some innovative technologies to be able to zoom in (and retain detail), stitch the images together and retrieve information on different parts of the universe.  As such, it would also appear that Microsoft's offering is a "premium version" of Google's offering.

And the winner is... 

Not wanting to sound cliche, but the ultimate winner is users.  Without the presence of Google's offering, all these services would be paid and without the presence of Microsoft, the quality of the content would not improve.

Nevertheless, it also appears that Microsoft is trying to differentiate itself from Google by trying to be the "premium" provider of services on the web.  Prior to the days of Google's everything is free mantra, premium offerings would charge a fee to users.  As it is unlikely that Microsoft would go down that track, their building of quality products probably implies that this is one step in their strategy to increase their legitimacy in the online space.

What can we expect?

As Microsoft has a long way to go, we can continue to see these Microsoft premium services, in competition to Google, pop up.  Furthermore, we can continue to expect them to be free.  It does appear, also, that Google is increasing it's purpose somewhat, with Street Views.  As such, there will probably be an increase in quality in Google's content.   It could be expected that Google's current portfolio are targets (Google Books , Scholar , Reader , News , Docs being some of the most popular) with Microsoft bringing their own slant to each.  Microsoft have some knowledge of eBooks (through their Microsoft Reader product from around 2000-2002), but there is still probably some pain felt internally after that product failed.  Nevertheless, with the technologies that Microsoft is working on (Microsoft Surface , PhotoSynth , among others), it would not be surprising to find alternatives to Google's offering being launched by Microsoft with some of these new technologies before the end of the year.

In short - 2008 looks to be an exciting year for these two giants!

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