I just saw that Redfin has switched its maps from Microsoft’s maps to Google’s maps. Why?
The Redfin blog says “speed, speed, speed.”
It says that Google’s maps are 385% faster than Microsoft’s.
This matches my observations too, but it doesn’t end there, and is why I have so many arguments lately with Steve Gillmor. Gillmor, you see, keeps telling me that Microsoft is going to really rock and roll with Ray Ozzie in charge (Ray’s teams are developing a bunch of really cool sounding cloud-based services, but then Microsoft’s Maps are really cool too, if you compare just features. Even the RedFin blog admits that Microsoft had more features, including more aerial views).
But, when I go to my wife’s blog, which is on Microsoft Spaces, it is TONS slower than WordPress. WordPress doesn’t have the huge data centers available to it that Microsoft has. Same when I use my Hotmail account. Gmail is faster. Same when I go to other things, because I’ve seen lots of people praising Microsoft’s Live.com services lately so I’ve been testing them out. Tonight ReadWrite Web, for instance, talks about the new Microsoft Labs bookmarking service.
But if you can’t make them fast, I just don’t want to have any part. This is the major reason why I chose to spend most of my time on FriendFeed instead of Facebook. Speed, speed, speed.
I thought I might be alone in that, but interesting to see Redfin making that point too.
What about you? Is there anything more important than speed? Especially when it comes to cloud services that I’m going to integrate into my blog?
With all the people Microsoft has hired in the past two years you would think a few would be capable of creating something exciting, but that has not happened.
Who cares?
Google is going to get creamed in this recession/depression, because their revenue comes from advertising. Vendors aren’t going to be willing to pay Google’s high advertising fees when people have cut back on spending. I have relatives in the advertising field that have already been laid off. Google needs to change its business model, fast.
Who cares?
Google is going to get creamed in this recession/depression, because their revenue comes from advertising. Vendors aren’t going to be willing to pay Google’s high advertising fees when people have cut back on spending. I have relatives in the advertising field that have already been laid off. Google needs to change its business model, fast.
Well, to start with MS Virtualearth would be much faster if they enabled caching of the 1Mb of Javascript that gets downloaded with every map instance.
Same goes for all the CSS, png, and gif images associated with the interface.
At least the map tiles themselves are cachable, but they rotate domain names. This is good because it increases the browser pipelining, but, it is not clear to me that they strongly tie the individual tiles to a domain name. If they don’t then they have defeated caching again.
Someone needs to point them to the Yahoo dev pages on server performance: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/
Well, to start with MS Virtualearth would be much faster if they enabled caching of the 1Mb of Javascript that gets downloaded with every map instance.
Same goes for all the CSS, png, and gif images associated with the interface.
At least the map tiles themselves are cachable, but they rotate domain names. This is good because it increases the browser pipelining, but, it is not clear to me that they strongly tie the individual tiles to a domain name. If they don’t then they have defeated caching again.
Someone needs to point them to the Yahoo dev pages on server performance: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/
[...] At the end of its two-year contract with Microsoft, real estate brokerage site Redfin went from a mix of Virtual Earth and Google Maps to Google Maps only. The reason? Google Maps renders pushpins a lot faster than VE, and a lot faster than it used to. “We did an evaluation and figured out a way to draw a large number of pushpins on GMaps very quickly. When we went with VE in 2006, GMaps was faster out of the box but slower once we started drawing on it, especially on IE6. … In the end, it was speed, speed, speed that convinced us to switch. In our worst case scenario of 500 pushpins on the map in IE6, GMaps is 385% faster” (emphasis mine). Via All Points Blog and Scobleizer. [...]
[...] Does Microsoft have a speed problem? [...]
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