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Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me,

Is anyone else remembering when Bing Maps was REALLY good? It had a 45 degree view of cities that looked insanely good, like Sim City. When you zoomed in too close, it switched to aerial imagery.

And it was all buttery smooth. What happened to that product?

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I was working for the company producing the dataset for Microsoft at the time [0]. I’m not really sure what happened to the product though, but at the time (circa 2007) it was indeed revolutionary.

[0] http://www.blomasa.com/

Yeah, that was great.

Bing also allowed OpenStreetMap to use its aerial imagery for tracing. This helped OSM a lot!

Google, on the other hand, asks users to help them with their proprietary data with no compensation.

If I recall correctly, founder of OpenStreetMap worked at Microsoft at the time.

Before Bing, Yahoo allowed OSM to trace.

And others followed suit later, e.g. DigitalGlobe

Yes, they called it bird's eye view. I think they got rid of it.

It's still there, in emasculated form, but instead of being able to browse around in oblique mode you have to right-click on a point of interest and select it.

And developers wonder why users "don't like change"...

emasculated → emaciated?

I think Bing made this change because they only have "birds-eye" imagery for a few cities.

Yes it was actually called “Bird’s Eye” view several years back.

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