I've taken a look a Microsoft's competitor to Google Maps several times, and each time I've been struck by the incredibly poor coverage of Canada: Not only is the search completely useless for Canadian addresses (even when you've very clearly indicated that you're looking in Canada, which is odd as they had great data on Canada in ancient MapPoint releases), the hilarity is compounded by the fact that the satellite imagery stops right at the border. Whether it's an imagery rights issue or not, it is quite contrary to the whole "Earth" thing in the product name. Maybe Microsoft Virtual United States of America on Earth is a more accurate name.

Of course Microsoft, being largely an American company, is entirely within its rights focusing on the US marketplace, just as I'm entirely within my rights to complain about it. It seems odd that something like satellite imagery has national boundaries, and it seems more likely that some product manager deep within the intestines of Microsoft decided that the hassle and storage of dealing with Canada wasn't worth the bother, and thus was it wiped from the map. A bit of a foolish decision given that there's a fair number of us, and given that it's cold most of the year we all tend to have high speed connections and predisposition to spending lots of time online.

An article was mentioned on Slashdot regarding Google's (or Yahoo's) creation of some sort of web-based Office suite. While the story is actually baseless speculation (it is supported as much as the title of this entry is), it did make me pause and contemplate where Google is going next. Consider for a moment that Google's primary innovation hasn't really been new products or technologies, but rather a business model and transactional efficiency that allows them to offer unprecedented amounts of processing, storage and bandwidth for users: Google has managed to make money offering services that most thought prohibitively costly. Google has absolutely redefined the market, and continues to do so with each release.

Given that Google has become a market leader, I see no reason why Google needs to continue to be tied to DHTML. Even with the so-called AJAX, HTML is realistically too coarse for something as rich as an Office suite (don't get me wrong - I was making highly dynamic engine control systems, using "AJAX" style methods, over 5 years ago. Nonetheless it is primarily a document layout technology, and shouldn't be shoehorned into every need). It would be a waste of engineering manpower to attempt to solve that problem with the wrong technologies.

I can entirely foresee Google completely splitting from HTML for some products - Google is one company that could release new services accessible via RDP or some other streaming graphical or vector format, and it would be immediately embraced by the community. If Google didn't leverage an existing technology, but instead invented something new, they would undoubtedly release it as a standard. A real Web 2.0 would be born.