did I choose a Microsoft mapping service?

a) Because I'm a rebel

b) Because I wont try anything outside the MS stack on the project

c) ...

You chose Microsoft because you develop on a very limited stack. This means you limit the problems you have to that of one company.

Apart from the obvious eggs in one basket, the money and the proprietary nature of the software I can understand your simple approach. Its enough of a challenge developing with bleeding edge software.

MS Maps are however, uglier than the Google counterparts.

- Joel

(btw. I note that you skipped the excellent Yahoo maps?)

We have been using Virtual Earth for the last year or so and we are very happy with the results. I have to say that our main reason for going with Microsoft was the licensing, Google were not easy to deal with on this and seemed to have a ridiculous licensing cost (i'm sure that with more effort we could have found a solution but why bother?) whereas the MS licensing was easy to deal with and, for us at least, was a good pricing structure.