Microsoft has announced it plans to discontinue its MapPoint and Street & Trips products by the end of this year. This announcement says that both products will be officially discontinued on December 31st, 2014. However, the online support for Street & Trips will continue until July 14, 2015.
Through Microsoft’s MapPoint users can view, edit and integrate maps into existing applications. It proved to be a useful tool for businesses to integrate their data with locations and maps. Microsoft’s Streets & Trips, also known as Microsoft Autoroute, was invented by a UK based company called as NextBase in 1988 for DOS-based PCs. Later on it was released to several companies like Apple Macintosh, Psion PDA and Atari ST. In early 1990 the product was supplied to Microsoft as well who eventually later acquired the mapping software in the year 1994. The latest version was a subset of MapPoint helping customer with route planning.
With the retirement of MapPoint and Streets & Trips, Microsoft suggests below migration plan to its customer,
- Need data visualization and analysis? PowerBI for Excel and Sharepoint
- Are you a developer? Check out Bing Maps API and SDK’s including AJAX V7 Control, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Control for desktop, REST Services, and Spatial Data Services, and other options.
- Just need maps and directions? Use Bing Maps
Though it looks difficult to find an exact reason for the premature end of these mapping products it does give enough indication how applications are slowly but surely making their way to the browser platform. Hence, Bing Maps is here to stay. However, one cannot say the same about the future of standalone products. Are they going to die completely in the coming years? Well, it’s pretty difficult to throw guesses right now, but you can be certain that few products will have their life cut short very soon.
Via.
