Google vs. Google

Maps vs. Earth
Google maps and google earth use somewhat different technology. Both share a spirit of taking the web experience past the dumb page behavior of the past 10 years.
Rasmussen
Lars Rasmussen, creator of google maps, outlined the new realities in a presentation this week.Its interesting that the underlying issues are quite similar to desktop portability issues:
On the desktop the contention has been over the use of native widgets vs the use of portable widget libraries. In the Java world this plays out as SWT (native widgets) vs Swing (portable widgets).
Native vs. Portable
Google maps takes the former approach -- they must use the native (IE approach) for drawing lines on IE, but use another approach in Firefox.
The key thing is they don't design for the lowest common denominator, they design for the user experience.