Microsoft AutoRoute

» see microsoft.com/autoroute as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

autoroute's peak years overlap with my windows years, but the use case was not really mine. anyway, ttnet had pushed me onto adsl by '06 and i was already pulling routes off yahoo maps and google maps in the browser, neither one of which required a cd in the drive or three hundred megabytes of disc space (close enough). autoroute was the boxed-software route planner for the people who still drove from london to istanbul once a year and wanted a single offline app with the whole continent in it. for whatever reason, that was a real demographic and turkey was on the cover of more than one release.

this part is mostly told from the british motoring press. the codebase came from nextbase ltd, a small esher software company founded in 1988 by a group of five friends who shipped the first autoroute on dos. anyway, microsoft bought the company in 1994 and folded the european product alongside automap streets, which became streets and trips in the us. for some reason, the two products shared an engine and a release schedule but different map data sets, since the data licensing for europe and north america came from different vendors.

i installed autoroute exactly once, on a windows xp machine in 2005 or '06, off a cd a cousin had bought in germany. either way, the install gave you a window split between a country-level map on the left and a route plan on the right. for whatever reason, the routing was fast for the hardware of the time and the printed-out turn-by-turn was the actual deliverable. anyway, you printed the route on a4 paper and read it from the passenger seat, since in-car navigation in europe was still a tomtom-or-garmin question at the time.

november 19 2014 microsoft announced that both autoroute and streets and trips would be discontinued. anyway, the sales window closed on december 31 2014, and the online services that fed live traffic and gas-price overlays were retired on july 14 2015. for whatever reason, microsoft did not name a replacement. the bing maps team had a web product and that was apparently the only forward path the company wanted to maintain.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the autoroute install footprint was huge for its era. for some reason, the full map data shipped on a single cd in the early years and grew to a dvd by the 2000s, with hundreds of megabytes of vector road segments and point-of-interest data. anyway, the search box let you type a town name in any of the 37 countries and the autocompleter pulled it up locally, no network round-trip required (close enough). the routing engine was a standard dijkstra over the road graph with a preference toggle for fastest versus shortest, and a third option for shortest with a "reasonable speed" filter (or roughly).

the gps add-on was the part that made it a real product for road trips. for whatever reason, the autoroute gps edition shipped with a small usb receiver puck you put on the dashboard. anyway, the laptop ran autoroute in a moving-map mode that drew your dot on the route in real time, with voice prompts before each turn. that was the closest thing to a tomtom you could get with a laptop you already owned, and it cost about a third of the dedicated unit at the time.

~ what got buried with it ~

the offline-first paradigm autoroute represented died about five years before the product did, mostly. by then, every smartphone shipped with a maps app that downloaded tiles on demand from a cloud service for free. anyway, google maps for android had launched in '08, the iphone maps app in '07, and the nokia ovi maps free-license decision in early '10 pushed offline turn-by-turn into the no-fee tier. for whatever reason, paying eighty euros every couple of years for a boxed planner that needed manual map updates was a hard sell against a phone that did it for nothing.

i was not paying attention to autoroute the year it died, but anyway, the british road-trip and motorhome forums kept running threads about it well into 2020. for some reason, the people who still used it were planning multi-week european trips with custom waypoint lists too big for the typical phone-maps interface, and the local-only routing meant the laptop kept working through tunnels and dead zones. honestly, autoroute survived in those niches because the offline experience never got worse, the world around it just got better at the online one.

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