Now, it seems, Delorme is the sole holdout for plastic disc mapping software. For folks who need offline information, Google Maps was never intended to fill that space.
Websites are going to use Google maps (or yahoo/mapquest/bing, to a much lesser extent) because their APIs allow embedded maps nice and easily. In the case of MapPoint, routes and distances were mass queried and used in tandem with Access and Excel to make geographical and topological data useful in a business context. People could then take their laptops and a serial (later USB and/or Bluetooth) GPS add-on and navigate with a laptop, without worrying about data plans, cellular outages, or getting stuck on a necessary phone call that brought into question one's allegiance to accurate navigation. See kids, in the days between the joys of attempting to re-fold a paper map and always-on, always-connected internet streamed maps, companies got all the street information together and sold a software release in a perpetual licensing format. MapPoint and S&T was a plastic-disc software title, intended for end users to do stuff without an internet connection. All I see is Google Maps when sites need to do something with mapping.
I for one had never even heard of these products, and I don't think I've ever encountered a web site using it.
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