TRANSLATION NOTES: Please read some comments at the end of this post.
Recently Google made certain changes to licenses, including mentions:
1. Launch of the portable version
This has been promoted for purposes such as natural disasters, involving loss of electrical power or connectivity. In this case there is a version to put on a USB disk or on a partition using VMWare.
It has also been proposed as an alternative to the institutions that have limited bandwidth Internet access, which could make Google Earth Portable data are served from the intranet. Let alone access to information in areas where there is no connectivity.
Google still doesn’t mention this version price, nor notified if this version is only for Google Earth Enterprise users, whose cost depends on what you’re really requiring; this means the more helpful SW, more money is needed to pay for it (*). (It shouldn’t but this image suggests so)
The Enterprise version includes Client, Server, and Fusion applications, now we will have to add also the Portable implementation. Of course, if you are very interested you could ask the purchase forms and the price, it makes it clear that you provide the disk.
2. Google Earth Plus became free.
Some time ago, for this version was paid $ 20 per year, at the end of 2008 this cost has been eliminated by making their features become part of the free version.
3. Google Earth Pro was $100.
The normal cost of this license is $ 400, while eliminated the cost of the Plus version, Google offered a temporary basis the Pro version for only $ 100, this to encourage those who had paid $ 20 to go one step further in exchange for some extra functionality.
Among the most attractive of this license is that you can import data .shp and .tab, and of course, you can get the image resolution of 4,800 pixels. Although coverage is the same, this topic makes many people confuse, because they assume that with this version there’s more high-resolution coverage.
TRANSLATION NOTES:
(*) The underline phrase is the most near explanation of the colloquial Spanish phrase: “depende del sapo, o de la pedrada”.