Microsoft Virtual Earth Renamed Bing Maps For Enterprise

Microsoft today unveiled Bing. Bing is a new Decision Engine and consumer brand providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions.

While the new Bing consumer brand is targeted towards the search market, Microsoft has renamed Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Live Search Maps was our consumer maps offering. This is the web site you go to for maps, aerial photos, directions, searching for points of interest and creating collections of your own personal data to store in the cloud. Live Search Maps is now called Bing Maps. Bing! That’s right, you know you’re going to do it every time you see the name. Bing! I digress.

local.live.com can now be referred to as Bing Maps!

Microsoft Virtual Earth was our enterprise mapping platform. This was the set of APIs you would leverage to embed maps into your web site along with overlay data in the form of pushpins, polygons, polylines, raster overlays, etc. etc. Microsoft Virtual Earth is now called “Bing Maps for Enterprise.”

Microsoft Virtual Earth can now be referred to as Bing Maps For Enterprise!

For some of the other services Microsoft offers, MapPoint Web Service and Photosynth. These will remain the same. http://www.bing.com should go live in the next few days. Microsoft is currently rolling the new brand, search platform out internally first.

I guess we will see ESRI updating their sites and documentation soon referring to Microsoft Virtual Earth as Bing Maps for Enterprise!

ArcGIS JavaScript™ Extension for Microsoft Virtual Earth™  = ArcGIS JavaScript™ Extension for Bing Maps for Enterprise™

Combine your organization’s GIS content hosted in ArcGIS Server with content from other organizations on top of Bing Maps For Enterprise™ base maps.

That just sounds weird!

The official press release on this new brand can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/… Microsoft Virtual Earth rebranding information can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/…