Microsoft MapPoint

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

~ the last words ~

mappoint was the kind of microsoft product you only knew about if you had a job that required mapping a sales territory. it was not on home computers. it was on the laptop of the regional manager who needed to plot 240 client addresses against an excel pipeline and color them by quarterly revenue. that is a real category of work, and for fourteen years mappoint was the most boring possible solution to it.

the product began in july 2000 as the business-tier sibling of streets and trips, which was itself a rebrand of the older expedia streets product. streets and trips was the consumer version, shipped at a cd-rom price for road-trip planning. mappoint was the business version, shipped at multiple hundred dollars and aimed at people who needed real route optimization across many stops, plus thematic shading bound to a clean excel data import. nine versions came out across fourteen years: mappoint 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. each one updated the road data and shifted the ribbon around but the core proposition never moved. you load a spreadsheet of locations. mappoint plots them.

microsoft killed the brand on december 31, 2014 alongside streets and trips. the official replacement was bing maps api for the route-and-plot side and the windows 10 maps app for the consumer side. neither was a real replacement. bing maps api wanted you to build a web app instead of clicking a button; windows 10 maps had no commercial-routing depth at all. the customers who actually needed mappoint either kept running the 2013 build on whatever mid-2010s laptop they had or migrated to esri arcgis at five times the price.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually replaced ~

before mappoint, people did this work with a wall map and pins. or with a printout of mapquest in 1999 alongside a spreadsheet of customer addresses they had to manually type into the printout's margins. mappoint was the version that connected the spreadsheet column to the dot on the map automatically. that is a small piece of automation, but for the right kind of work it saved entire afternoons of address-entry tedium every week. there are reps who built their entire scheduling routine around the saturday-morning mappoint run.

~ the actual end ~

the 2014 shutdown notice was three paragraphs long. microsoft cited "the cloud era" and pointed at bing maps and windows 10 maps as the path forward. neither was a desktop application with vba bindings, so the practical effect was that mappoint users were not migrating, they were being deprecated. most moved to esri or caliper maptitude. the rest stayed on the 2013 build on windows 7 indefinitely. neither the routes nor the customers moved. only the supported product did.

~ the legacy ~

microsoft never replaced mappoint with a desktop-tier mapping product. the windows 10 maps app got minor updates through 2020 and was effectively retired in 2025 as a separate brand. bing maps for enterprise is being shut down in june 2025 with customers pushed to azure maps. the original mappoint code is dead, but the kind of work it did, plotting an excel sheet onto a road map for someone with a quota, never went away. it just moved to web dashboards and from there to whatever the salesforce route-planning add-on of the year happens to be.

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