Two recent announcements caught my attention:
“The Google Earth API has been deprecated as of December 12th, 2014. The API will continue to work on supported browsers until December 12th, 2015, and will shut down on that date.”
See the full Google Earth API announcement
“Google will end support for the Google Maps Engine (GME) product on January 29, 2016. After January 29, 2016.”
See the full Google Maps Engine announcement
Google Earth Pro free (previously fee licensed)… thanks Nathan
No map engine clears the way for ArcGIS Online, CartoDb and others. One can but speculate about Google’s strategy, but its hard not to ask is Google getting out of the mapping game?
We don’t believe it for a minute.
More information to come here to be sure. See our post GIS in 2015 and What the Experts Think for additional thoughts.