As I mentioned in brief yesterday and covered by GIS bloggers all over the new 3D beta of Virtual Earth is out now. Now, the Google Earth blog sees it as no threat all all but looking at the comparisons that James Fee posted.. I am wondering.
Now, first thing you have to do is put fanboyism aside, in a locked box and throw it in the closet.. I know it is hard for GE users to do that.. but do it anyway. (I don't use Google Earth much... mainly because it is horrid on a dial-up connection (Yes, people, dial-up is still quite common all over the USA) same goes for Virtual Earth.. that is painfully slow on a dial-up as well. World Wind, of the three, works well on a modem.) This is a beta and 9 times out of 10, they get better and more people start using it. I wouldn't be discounting it as no threat yet.
Now for the World Wind side.. we have the Virtual Earth plug-in to view VE imagery inside of World Wind, and this still has the lawyers blessing from Microsoft. I am wondering what it would take, or if it was even possible to bring all/some of these new goodies as features of the VE Plug-in and then display all the new 3D as a layer in World Wind.
I looked into the javascript API and the ActiveX controls last night, and it seems that all datasources are described by a XML manifest, and programmatically added to the client viewer.%0D%0AThis would mean that you could add your own manifests to the viewer, and have you own tiles, 3D models AND TERRAIN (the latter something that Google can't). Although only how to add new tiles is documented, it wouldn't surprise me if they soon will show how to add terrain and buildings as well. ...and as soon as you can do that, I can't really see whats stopping you from using the exisiting data in World Wind as well.