Westfield shopping centre: Google may not be right but we will use it anyway.

Westfield shopping centre opened a few days ago and we are about to head down and take a peek. I am sure it will be chaos..

Anyhow, back to the point - it is served by 4 stations, one of which is new so I figured I’d take a look at the map for where the various stations were located. (Read - which one had the shortest walking distance!). Over on the Westfield shopping site I took a look at the maps (here).

The map is provided by Google. Excellent, I can scroll around and see some of the latest in mapping technology but I cannot actually see the new stations because Google has not updated the map yet. Not only is there no new tube station, there is actually no Westfield shopping centre at all, just one big hole! Yet they are using it for their mapping LOL.

Head on over to Streetmap and sure enough its fully updated. The other major mapping site I use is Microsoft’s mapping service but that does not show the new shopping centre either (here).

Maybe they assumed Google would update in time - you would have thought the Westfield team would have checked nearer the launch date but I guess not. So for directions/maps to Westfield Shopping Centre use Streetmap.

This leads to a larger problem for Microsoft online though. There was a time, whether right or wrong, when everyone defaulted to Microsoft products. It is not a surprise to anyone I don’t think when I say that online, Microsoft is not the default solution; Google is, Yahoo and/or Microsoft was. For Microsoft to win online, it has to go above and beyond Google to such an extent that they wow their userbase. Make them want to stay. That still is not the case online. Whilst their Azure cloud computing sounds great and it will help them with making their existing dominant applications dominant online as well as offline (Office is the obvious one), their online Windows Live services still are nowhere near achieving this.

Looking at this minor error by Westfield could have been an opportunity for Microsoft. I could have been saying here that they should have used Microsoft instead of Streetmap. In fact the content of this post would have been quite different. Instead Microsoft’s mapping solution was restricted to one negative line.