Google is ending a 10-year run of Google Earth Enterprise (GEE), which contributed greatly to the market for geospatial “Digital Earth” products for business. Google also has a reputation for ending support for some of its products. On March 20, 2015, it “deprecated” Google Earth Enterprise, meaning that it should be avoided, and announced that it would stop supporting it two years later. The company had previously announced that it would discontinue support for its Google Earth API and for Google Maps Engine. It will support the latter through the end of January 2016.

Google Earth Engine, on the other hand, “is moving forward like gangbusters, with accelerating adoption,” according to Rebecca Moore, Google’s manager for Google Earth Engine and Earth Outreach. Earth Engine is a platform developed to turn pixels into knowledge at global scale, all for societal benefit. Watch for an article in a future issue.

GEE allows organizations to store and process terabytes of imagery, terrain, and vector data on their own servers, and publish maps securely for their users to view using Google Earth desktop or mobile apps, or through their own application using the Google Maps API. Asked repeatedly to discuss the end of GEE, Google declined to comment for this story.

To read more, click here, then scroll down to page 16