The folks over at Microsoft did make an announcement recently that they will no longer support a couple of their mapping products – namely MapPoint and Streets and Trips, where these two services have already picked up their very last update, and will eventually be sent to the gulag, er, retirement home. Fret not, however, since Bing Maps will take over the role of both, and then some.
So far, it has been pretty difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when these services arrived at their ‘End of Life’ stage, but one thing’s for sure, Bing Maps is here to stay. Just what did MapPoint offer in the past? Well, MapPoint did make life easier when it comes to viewing, editing and integrating maps into current applications, while Streets and Trips happens to be a route planning package which was a subset of MapPoint. Considering how Bing Maps has advanced forward after all this while, it is no surprise then to hear that the other two products are being retired.
This just goes to show how applications are slowly but surely making their way to the browser platform, bringing the days of such standalone products to an end, at least for certain niches.
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