For my first post I broke my own rules. I woke up today to the news that Microsoft unleashed the me too of 3D mapping software. I was impressed with the bird's eyeview of Virtual Earth, so I was curious to see how things would go over. My initial plan for this site was to not invest more than a couple minutes into any product review, since that is how first impressions are formed.
I navigated to local.live.com to get a pleasant message that I can leave my Firefox at the door. Repeat again with IE6.0 and I am downloading... A few minutes into my "3D" experience, I was watching an exciting progress bar progress excitingly slowly. Not only did I get to experience the 3D painfully slow progress bar, I got 2 for the price of 1 with my .NET 2.0 installation!
Fastforward 12 minutes later and I am back to local.live.com and ready for some hardcore 3D action of my apartment in San Francisco. Unlike Google's offering, VE3D lives in IE ( I should mention that the link provided by clicking the logo in the top left of live.com does not work at the time of my test).
After a little configuration, I was flying around. The image quality is excellent (much better than Google Earth) and the controls are easy...but the performance is pretty dismal. Granted I don't have the best machine, but then again neither do most people. MS VE3D has not convinced me to buy a quad-core computer. I'll stick with gEarth.
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