Go to Live Local (or MSN Virtual Earth, whatever you prefer to call it) http://local.live.com and enter the following string on the second box ("Enter city, address or landmark"):
47.68096 -122.13501
What do you get? Some bizarre match on New York because MSN thought the closest match was the zipcode 13501.
Google does the right think and assume this is a Latitude/Longitude value.
My point is that Google is being done by Computer Science engineers. And engineers love to get this kind of feature done. They always justify it by saying "I'll use that".
Microsoft software is also done by engineers, and they do have ideas like that, but it never gets into the product, you know why? Because there wasn't a program manager to "sponsor" it, or because customers didn't ask for it, or the few that asked were considered too outside of the mainstream customer base, or because the feature that would take just a couple of hours to get done was cancelled after 6 meetings of 1h each because they couldn't find the right way to explain in the user documentation, or because the tester thought it would be too hard to test it, or the PM thought that nobody would use it, or the International PM thought the use of "dot" versus "comma" would be too problematic in Europe, or ....
Disclaimer: I have a few friends that work on Virtual Earth.
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and enter the following string on the second box ("Enter city, address or landmark"):
Comments (2) for "Google vs. Microsoft - Why G...
October, 2007