Bing Maps Streetside

» see bing.com/maps as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

bing maps streetside was the kind of microsoft consumer product the engineering side of microsoft cared about more than anyone using a web map did. i used google maps. streetside was the alternative tab i opened twice in fifteen years to compare imagery quality. by the time i had any reason to switch defaults, the streetside imagery refresh cycle had fallen far enough behind google street view that the comparison was over before it began.

this is mostly told from the microsoft press releases. streetside launched in december 2009 as a layer in the bing maps silverlight viewer. imagery came from microsoft-operated vans with omnidirectional camera rigs, coverage was selected US metropolitan areas at launch plus vancouver and whistler (the latter timed to the 2010 winter olympics). european cities arrived in may 2012, germany was specifically not included after a wave of privacy appeals that also forced google to fuzz out residential street view tiles in germany around the same year.

the part streetside never solved was the refresh cycle. google street view kept rolling new car-and-trekker imagery through the 2010s, microsoft did one pass of most US cities and let the tiles age. by 2018 the average streetside tile in a US city was four or five years older than the corresponding google street view tile. that was the cliff. no one looking for current sidewalk conditions or current storefronts was going to choose the layer that had not been updated since the obama administration.

~ the record ~

~ what streetside did differently ~

the technical pitch for streetside in 2009 was that microsoft's image capture used 360-degree omnidirectional cameras instead of google's panorama-stitched dome, which was supposed to mean smoother transitions when moving the view angle. in practice the difference was invisible at the typical street-view zoom level. the user-facing display was a silverlight-rendered viewport for the first six years, requiring the silverlight browser plugin that microsoft itself was already deprecating by 2015.

that was the recurring bing maps mistake: betting consumer features on microsoft-only browser tech that the broader web was leaving behind. flash had the same trajectory and at least had a multi-vendor reason to exist for a while. silverlight was a microsoft-only stack from the start. building a consumer-facing imagery product on top of it locked the imagery to the platform's lifespan.

~ how the silverlight bet became the sunset ~

silverlight was microsoft's rich-internet-application platform, launched 2007 and end-of-lifed in october 2021. bing maps had been a silverlight showcase since 2010 and every interactive feature ran through the plugin. the migration to an HTML5-based viewer started in 2017 with a parallel 'modern' bing maps experience. the silverlight version stayed live alongside it through june 30 2025 because the modern viewer never replicated every layer cleanly. streetside in particular was harder to port than the base map.

the october 2025 cleanup was the final act for the consumer-facing silverlight tier. bird's eye view and streetside both got the cut. neither had a clean HTML5 successor in the modern viewer. apple maps look around and google street view took the imagery-tier mindshare while microsoft was managing the silverlight retirement. enterprise customers paying for bing maps for enterprise retained API access to streetside imagery through june 30 2028, a three-year transition window for the business tier that still depended on it.

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