Bing Maps (Virtual Earth) the Evolution

How did Microsoft manage to get all the way to Bing Maps? As many of you already know, Bing Maps is the result of the rebranding of Live Search Maps. The start of June 2009 brought with it the death of Live Search, the search engine and the brand. In this context, Microsoft transitioned not only its search engine, but all connected Live Search services to a new consumer brand, namely Bing. This is how Live Search Maps became Bing Maps and how Virtual Earth was relabeled as Bing Maps for Enterprise. But this stage was nothing but the latest step in the evolution of the service and associated mapping, search and location platform.

In fact, the Redmond company had started working on Virtual Earth a while back. At the bottom of this article you will be able to find an embedded video featuring Bing Maps infrastructure architect and Partner Development Manager Gur Kimchi. Looking for an insight into the evolution of Virtual Earth from embryo to Bing Maps? Then the video has all the right answers for you. It's almost an hour of exploring the past and present of Bing Maps from one of the people intimately connected with the project since the start.

“Gur Kimchi (Bing Maps infrastructure Architect and Development Manager) sat down in an episode of Expert to Expert on Channel 9 to discuss the evolution of Bing Maps (formerly Microsoft Virtual Earth). The interview goes pretty deep in discussing how the original Virtual Earth was built based on a Bill Gates approved Think Week Paper and a production-based prototype was done in 100 days; the comparison to Google's investment in maps and data centers versus Microsoft's and how Bing Maps was architectured from the onset to scale to a massive proportion. Worth the hour of your time required to understand Bing Maps from the inside-out,” revealed Chris Pendleton, the Virtual Earth technical evangelist for Microsoft.