I saw this nice post "Why Do We Do It?" from Mano Marks who is the Geo Developer Advocate at Google in which he answers the question I've had for so long: Why is Google Earth (and Google Maps API) free? I love Google Earth and have been a devotee since it came out in the mid 2000s. I've marveled at how Google Earth is made available to all of us for nothing and all of us can come up with incredible ideas with how to use Google Earth and Google Maps.
Mano: "But fundamentally, we do it because it's the right thing to do, we do it because we believe that people want to, that they benefit from using maps as a platform for understanding data."
Hurray for free! Hurray for all of us using maps for understanding where we live!
The Google Earth image above was grabbed from the Teaching Science and Math blog.
Added 10/5/11: This just in...Google Earth has been downloaded more than 1 Billion times. Crazy, right?!
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