[feduphacker]

What a crock of shit. Have you heard of MapQuest, Bing Maps, or Yahoo! Maps? How about AltaVista or Yahoo! Search? BabelFish ring a bell? If Google changed the world through all their ad-infested crap, it certainly was late to do so.

[pyre]

  | Bing Maps

This was another 'me too' product from Microsoft. IIRC, Microsoft didn't have web maps prior to Google maps.

[dchichkov]

Er. There was a certain scalability demo of Microsoft SQL server, of all things. Some time back in 1997 or 1998 it was... Terraserver was the name. Just a tidy bit before google.