Microsoft Releases Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control
March 18, 2009 16 Comments
So Microsoft has released a Silverlight map control to developers:
Now, because we’re using Silverlight, .NET developers (all 6 million + of you) can leverage your skill set to build rich, killer apps that make your data bling and highlight media in a geo-contextual way as has never been seen before. VESL leverages all of the drawing tools that come with Silverlight, so for Silverlight developers you’re not relearning how to take your computer art and force it onto a map. Instead, you’re starting with a map-based canvas instead of a blank one.
Looks simple enough to leverage and I’m guessing since Microsoft developers are in love with Silverlight, it won’t be long before the JSAPI is pushed aside. It looks like people will start having to pick a side, Flash or Silverlight.
Silverlight is bling
About James Fee
I’d go with Google over Microsoft any day. If only because Google is much less likely to threaten you with legal action if you find a way to incorporate their service inside your online mapping application in a way they didn’t intend.
I’m sure both Silverlight and Flash will both be viable platforms. however.
Don’t be so sure about Google…
Per our previous conversation none of this is game changing until the licensing for internal, behind the corporate firewall apps changes for either Google or Microsoft.
But if it pushes Google to release a ActionScript API for the Google Earth plugin, I’ll be happy.
Brian Timoney
you might be interested in this from the manifold forum
http://forum.manifold.net/forum/t80209.23
Curious if anyone knows what the install base for Silverlight plug-in looks like to date?
Flash appears near ubiquitous:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html
That would seem to be one of the big differentiators
As Brian deftly points out above, it is about the license moving forward. If Google (or MSFT) can’t get their act together, people will look for other solutions.
on licensing to be specific:
VE license is based on transactions beginning at $8k per year for 1M transactions. This translates to 8M tile requests per annum.
Although this sounds like a lot, when switching to a Silverlight/deepzoom type tiling source, there are way more tiles involved! I ran a simple test using DeepEarth (a similar codeplex ui) that showed 540 tile requests for a single zoom from level 0 to roof top. Looking at 8M tiles per year or 22k tiles per day, this means just around 40 zooms per day would exhaust the entry level transactions.
Most of these requests in a Silverlight/DeepZoom UI never even make it to the screen since a wheel zoom passes down the levels faster than rendering animations. Perhaps this new Silverlight tile engine is more sophisticated and only counts fully rendered tile calls, but that would mean some type of return call to the server indicating a render complete and seems unlikely.
It isn’t so much the cost that is troubling, but the inability to make accurate predictions of the ultimate cost to a client.
For example: a simple emergency dispatch application may not have many users, but if a bored dispatcher spends just a few minutes a day playing with a dispatch GUI application, it could wreak havoc on a county budget! (and make me look really bad)
We actually have several licensing options available for Virtual Earth – transaction-based pricing being just one of them. We have an unlimited transaction option that sets a flat fee price. We have a “mobile only” option for mobile developers granting access only to our mobile tile set. We have a pricing as part of the Microsoft Global Startup Program that starts at $2,000. Also, for the transaction-based pricing the transaction price per transaction declines as you commit to more upfront – a waterfall schedule. So, while yes, Silverlight will consume more transactions based solely on the multi-image scaling we have more flexible pricing and licensing models to address it. For the Silverlight Map Control CTP, the restrictions are looser since we’re assuming the responsibility of the transactions and plan to have new terms of use in place by the time it comes out of CTP.
CP
I’m really hoping that this means that us Mac users will finally be able to access the cool 3D building stuff in Virtual Earth, which doesn’t currently run on Macs. Haven’t seen any specific mention of this from a quick skim of various links – anyone know if this will indeed be the case?
Well here comes ESRI with their Silverlight solution today. Just in time for Developer’s Conference.
http://resources.esri.com/arcgisserver/apis/silverlight/
As others have mentioned there is simply no affordable way for any ISV or Micro ISV to use this or any offering from Google in a small application.
Licensing is based on the idea that the company buying the license uses mapping tools for their primary source of revenue, not for those that simply want to add simply mapping functionality to an existing application.
Until someone blinks on this the only financially viable solution for ISV’s producing small affordable applications is to integrate with the Mappoint desktop edition and let the end user choose to buy MapPoint or not.
I’ve just spent 6 months trying to find some affordable way to integrate mapping into our small .net application for commercial use and it’s just not going to happen. Microsoft, google, Yahoo etc are all sitting on their expensive data and not finding any way to make it affordable for the little guys yet on the other hand giving it away for free useage. It’s nonsensical to say the least.
JohnC have you talked to MSFT in the last few months, they have some new pricing models that Im sure are viable even for the small guys with no upfront costs
Yes, I got updated pricing from them last week. It’s completely useless for an ISV. I asked for pricing from the perspective of a small ISV and the guy told me they have a perfect plan for me which is VAR pricing. Note this is exactly the same plan they had months ago, there’s been no change or the guy at “wimmer solutions” is not aware of it. (why can’t Microsoft handle their own sales anyway?)
Basically it involves us becoming a reseller for Mappoint services and having to collect from our customers *after* they have used the service for who knows how much cost then pay it back to Microsoft.
That is great if your primary business revolves around mapping, it’s very bad if your primary business is making software that happens to have a mapping component added on.
I can just see it now: we offer such a plan to our customers, they go wild and rack up thousands of dollars in fees unwittingly and we’re left holding the bag. We don’t want to do Microsoft’s accounting work for them, we simply want to make software and sell it.
Now a plan where our customers could subscribe directly, themselves, for a reasonable fee each year for a reasonable number of hits would be a true ISV oriented plan.
He didn’t seem to understand what an ISV was, he seemed to think a VAR is the same thing.
I don’t get how Microsoft is so ISV oriented in all their other programs and the virtual earth mappoint people seem to be off on their own planet with an FU attitude to ISV’s, not what I’ve come to expect from Microsoft but unfortunately everyone else does the same thing so I guess they feel justified in taking the same approach as Google, Yahoo, Mapquest etc etc.
Why they are trying to push this stuff to developers without a business plan to back it is a mystery to me, I can only assume they care about exactly two kinds of customers: corporate ones with deep pockets who make their revenue directly from mapping services and free and open source developers who make no revenue.
This is why I find the “All 6 million+ of you” comment in the original post so offensive. Or perhaps I’m being uncharitable and the development people simply have no idea what is going on in the real world.
Ok, so some heated commentary here – clearly not what we want to see. It is true that the ISV pricing schedule has not been perfected to align with many of Microsoft’s business and much of this is caused by a two-fold problem (1) because we’re the only service at Microsoft that actually generates revenue as an ingredient of other products – this service model bucks the trend for all billing aspects we have in place and doesn’t scale with the current architecture – transactions don’t mean anything in our world of SKUs; and (2) we’re one of the only services at Microsoft that pays royalties for the use of certain data sets (imagery and road data, alike). So, it’s a challenge to fit this inline with a business model the aligns with what most ISVs are used to at Microsoft, but we will get there. Our partners are key to the product’s success and as we continue to sophisticate ourselves by leveraging other Microsoft business assets these problems will be resolved. I can assure you this is something we are actively working to resolve and will have a solution for ISVs in the very near future.
CP
b.gates looks like bradford cox from Deerhunter!
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