Users prevail: Microsoft undoes forced move to Multimap

Within hours of Microsoft redirecting its UK users from Live Search Maps to Multimap last week, user dissatisfaction spread like wildfire.

On Monday, April 14, Microsoft responded and restored full Live Search Maps access to disgruntled users.

Microsoft bought Multimap in December 2007 and made it a subsidiary of its Virtual Earth and Search teams.

Microsoft released new versions of Live Search Maps and Virtual Earth 3D on April 11. At the same time, it unleashed the forced move to Mulimap on its UK customers.

The decision to make the new versions of Live Maps and Virtual Earth unavailable to UK users caught many, including some Microsoft employees themselves, off-guard. The LiveSide.Net folks responded by publishing a workaround, allowing UK users to circumvent Multimap.

I heard from a couple of less-than-happy UK customers over the weekend. From one:

"Microsoft seem to have integrated their virtual earth technology in to multimap, but we have lost a great deal of functionality in the process. & more importantly, we can't access our collections anymore unless we access the site using a querystring that forces us to use the US version of the site!!"

It's smart that Microsoft reversed its unpopular decision. But one has to wonder: Why did the company flip the MultiMap switch with no prior warning in the first place?

Update: Microsoft officials say the Multimap move was a mistake -- almost as bad as the "New Coke" fiasco. From a posting to the Virtual Earth blog:

"As part of our release of the latest version of Live Maps this past Friday, MultiMap.com released an update to their mapping and directions site in the UK that introduced a bunch of new features, including integration of some of the unique capabilities of Live Maps such as Birds Eye imagery. As part of this launch our goal was to introduce our Live Maps customers to the MultiMap site and give them a choice of which they wanted to use. The MultiMap site has some features like Ordnance Survey and Collins Bartholomew maps, tube stops, etc... that are very focused on the UK and well liked by their customers. Our intention was to let our Live Maps customers give these features a trial.

"But a couple of unfortunate bugs caused the redirect to not go as planned! One issue was that the MultiMap site was supposed to have prominent links back to Live Maps so that visitors could easily get back if they wanted. Also, web surfers who specifically entered maps.live.com in their browser should not have been redirected at all; only the links from the MSN homepage and other places should have been redirecting to Multimap. But the redirection bug caused all requests for Maps.live.com to redirect to Multimap and was compounded by the fact that there was no link to get back to Live maps. Ugh. it was an ugly situation indeed."