Enki - Microsoft make something, actually, really neat!

[Captain Utopia]

  http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html

[Dimocritus]

There's always cool stuff going down at the TED conference.

[Captain Utopia]

Yeah, it's pretty much an elitist club, but I'd still attend it in a heartbeat!

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

So, Microsoft has cloned Google Earth and integrated it with a clone of StreetView and an astronomy program?

Granted, they did really cool things with it, but none of it is *new*.

[Richter]

"New" doesn't immeditately equal successful.  Wired (Amid their "Sport illustrated for tech" style drivel), had a good breakdown of this.  Early companies doing auctions, resumes, online funds TF's, etc., who flopped becasue it was clumbsy or too nouveau and not relevant yet.  

Edit: Google maps is liekly my fav. example.  It did what mapquest started, but cleaner, quicker, and friendly.

[Captain Utopia]

The augmented reality/streetview/photosynth integration was new to me.  Credit where credit is due.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

"New" doesn't immeditately equal successful.  Wired (Amid their "Sport illustrated for tech" style drivel), had a good breakdown of this.  Early companies doing auctions, resumes, online funds TF's, etc., who flopped becasue it was clumbsy or too nouveau and not relevant yet.  

Edit: Google maps is liekly my fav. example.  It did what mapquest started, but cleaner, quicker, and friendly.

You make a good point, but a potentially irrelevant one. To the extent that google earth is already successful, it already does all of those things (admittedly, I'm not entirely sure if it is this integrated). It appears to be a direct microsoft clone of google's map/earth labs.

[Richter]

"New" doesn't immeditately equal successful.  Wired (Amid their "Sport illustrated for tech" style drivel), had a good breakdown of this.  Early companies doing auctions, resumes, online funds TF's, etc., who flopped becasue it was clumbsy or too nouveau and not relevant yet.  

Edit: Google maps is liekly my fav. example.  It did what mapquest started, but cleaner, quicker, and friendly.

You make a good point, but a potentially irrelevant one. To the extent that google earth is already successful, it already does all of those things (admittedly, I'm not entirely sure if it is this integrated). It appears to be a direct microsoft clone of google's map/earth labs.

Potentially irrelevant, granted, but you hit on exactly what I was driving it when you said "Integrated".  They didn't invent it, certainly, but they did something new and interesting with it.  Like when they released subsequent versions of windows that supported the software of previous versions.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

"New" doesn't immeditately equal successful.  Wired (Amid their "Sport illustrated for tech" style drivel), had a good breakdown of this.  Early companies doing auctions, resumes, online funds TF's, etc., who flopped becasue it was clumbsy or too nouveau and not relevant yet.  

Edit: Google maps is liekly my fav. example.  It did what mapquest started, but cleaner, quicker, and friendly.

You make a good point, but a potentially irrelevant one. To the extent that google earth is already successful, it already does all of those things (admittedly, I'm not entirely sure if it is this integrated). It appears to be a direct microsoft clone of google's map/earth labs.

Potentially irrelevant, granted, but you hit on exactly what I was driving it when you said "Integrated".  They didn't invent it, certainly, but they did something new and interesting with it.  Like when they released subsequent versions of windows that supported the software of previous versions.

I'm not actually sure that such integration does not exist in the KML application sphere. In fact, I'm reasonably sure that much of it does (though perhaps not the video overlay). Google earth integrates streetview and maps, and what was documented here was a clone of earth, a clone of streetview, a clone of maps, a video overlay (which might be two lines of code and a one-off that only works in that bistro), and a transfer over to an existing astronomy app. There was some new integration, but mostly re-implementation of existing (already integrated) things, and what integration was new was not really demonstrated to be anything but a one-off. I don't see microsoft doing anything here that has not been done by google, nor anything that cannot be done integration-wise with a few lines of code and a google api key.

To be honest, I'm not particularly impressed, merely because it's something that anyone with a copy of google earth has been able to do for over a year.