Story by
Emil Protalinski
Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, incl Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, including Ars Technica, Neowin, TechSpot, ZDNet, and CNET. Stay in touch via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Microsoft has quietly announced plans to discontinue its MapPoint and Streets & Trips products at the end of this year. Both will be officially killed off on December 31, 2014, though online support for the latter will continue through July 14, 2015.
We say “quietly” as we have not been able to find a blog post or otherwise official announcement from Microsoft. Instead, the news comes to us by means of the official Microsoft landing pages for the products: MapPoint and Streets & Trips (via Neowin).
Microsoft MapPoint allows users to view, edit, and integrate maps by facilitating the geographical visualization and analysis of either included data or custom data. The initial release came in the form of MapPoint 2000, which has been improved and enhanced approximately every two years.
Here is how Microsoft expects its users to migrate away from MapPoint:
- Need data visualization and analysis? PowerBI for Excel and Sharepoint.
- Are you a developer? Bing Maps API and SDKs including AJAX V7 Control, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Control for desktop, REST Services, and Spatial Data Services.
- Just need maps and directions? Use Bing Maps.
Microsoft Streets & Trips, known outside of North America as Microsoft Autoroute, was originally created by UK company NextBase in 1988 for DOS-based PCs. It was later released for the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST and Psion PDA, as well as ported to Windows in the early 1990s. Microsoft acquired the mapping software in 1994.
The latest version is essentially a subset of MapPoint targeted at the average consumer looking to perform a variety of map related tasks such as route planning. Again, the company is pointing users to simply switch to Bing Maps, which underscores the trend of supplanting software with online services.
We have contacted Microsoft for more information about this news. We will update this article if we hear back.
See also – Bing Maps for Windows 8 gets personalized recommendations, Yelp and TripAdvisor, roaming favorites, and more and Bing Maps adds 270TB of Bird’s Eye imagery, the most to date, and expands Venue Maps to 4,700 in 59 countries
Top Image Credit: Leszek Nowak
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