Google serves MS and Yahoo for routing

If you haven’t seen it go do a google route RIGHT NOW! After the route is finished start dragging points in the middle and watch the route recalculate right before your very eyes. Here is a sample if you don’t want to type places in. This has to be one of the best AJAX things I have ever seen.

You wanna start taking bets now on how long until it does traveling salesman type optimizations or tying directly into the traffic feeds or tie ins to google news?

If I were a small or medium business that needed maps and directions with some custom points of interest – I would be knocking in Googles door for an intranet license. How much do you think it would costs to set up this kind of infrastructure for myself and get it to work some time in this century.  Think about the value in this.

Oh yeah, and one more point for all us developer types , the bar has been raised yet again for what users will come to expect as “standard”. I can see the discussion now – “When I move break point in the electrical line around I want to see the power reroute in real time.”

I don’t think I even have to mention what this means for ArcGIS Server w/ network analyst or even on desktop ArcGIS…

Hat tip to Brian Flood for pointing it out. As he said (paraphrasing) – if they can do with web service calls what can they not do?