OP suggested this was happening back in the day. Either way:
MapQuest didn't suck because of its UI model. MapQuest sucked because it was clunky, slow, and cluttered. Its implementation was crap.
When you look at today's MapQuest, they've largely corrected this. The maps are much less ugly, they now pick a (somewhat) reasonable level of detail based on your zoom level and moving around the map is fast whether you're using their joystick control or dragging the map.
The sad thing is, none of this is rocket science. It shouldn't have taken them this long to figure out. Google Maps steadily, inevitably eroded their market share and last I heard, they were 10% behind.
Not to mention the fact that MapQuest took years to come out with something that even comes close to the user experience of Google Maps, which suggests to me that GMaps completely broadsided them, and that they didn't have anything remotely close to that sophistication even considered/researched.
It seems to be, as an outsider anyways, that MapQuest got lazy, not just out-done by Google.
Maps had smooth, animated panning and zooming that updated the map in real time without reloading the page. MapQuest and the other major competitors at the time only allowed panning and zooming by clicking buttons on the side of the map, which scrolled a predefined number of steps and reloaded, at least initially, the entire page when you did so.
Google Maps was also less cluttered and used the browser's real estate much effectively. MapQuest was a small, cramped map by comparison.
Personally I don't think Google Maps (upon it's conception) was 10x better than Mapquest. Even for a while after Maps came around, Mapquest was pretty compelling. Yahoo Maps was also around during this time, circa 2002 I believe, though I don't recall using it much.
I can think of quite a few products that weren't all that great upon first release. Sometimes it takes a few iterations/generations for it to really make sense.
My friend, you must not have been around during the days we would print out directions from Mapquest before every trip. I remember when Google Maps was first announced, I sat there dragging the map around my screen and was amazed to see the tiles fill in. It was like nothing else at the time.
After spending 10 minutes trying to find where Google moved their menu so I could print directions, (I completely missed the hamburger menu blended into the text box) I gave up used MapQuest instead.
Instead of focusing on the quality of their map data, MapQuest can just compete by not ruining their UX.
Yes, MapQuest has had an immense downturn in quality. It used to be my favorite, but Google Maps has won me over.
"I think there are a variety of things to pursue:
"1. Fix the consumer experience ASAP - make consumers love MapQuest again
"2. Find your voice in the market - maybe strive to be 'the most accurate directions on the web'."
MapQuest could still beat Google Maps in accuracy if it tried. (Google Maps doesn't know where my house is, for example.) This is a good space in which to have competition to build the best user experience.
There's such a huge gap in usability between Mapquest and the first Google Maps release it would be hard to overstate it. Both gmail and google maps were groundbreaking not for the fact that they gave you "webmail" or "maps on the web" but for the fact that they did so as properly interactive applications where the HTTP connection got out of your way and you could dynamically interact.
Back then Google was doing this kind of groundbreaking stuff. Other people had all the technology pieces but Google was kind of the only company doing these things at scale and letting their engineers cook it up and ship it quickly, and in the early/mid-2000s it seemed like they were dropping a new "wow, nifty" type of thing every few months.
From the people I know who were there at the time (I joined later, end of 2011 time frame, right as "the social wars" and the G+ era was happening) it sounds to me like a serious empowered-nerd culture where people just got out of your way so you could do stuff with all the neat tools that were available to you.
That era at Google has ended some years ago now. It's too big, too political (and no, I don't mean "woke" politics, but corporate / promo / perf politics) and if you had a "neat idea" like how, say, Gmail started, you'd have a hell of a time making it happen past the layers of product managers etc.
... And if you work in a codebase like, say, Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions and a massive build that will bog down a machine with a couple dozen cores and 128GB of RAM, and bring any IDE to its knees. A far cry from the breath of fresh air of lightness and speed that original beta Chrome version felt like, with its graphic novel / comic introduction [1] and raw "hey isn't this neat check this out" vibe...
Meanwhile, I get frustrated by the changes in their cartography style almost every time I use Google Maps. Most of the time I do want an actual map, and even when I’m not so fussed about that, the old style conveyed more useful details for the sorts of things I was doing. If you want to explore an area geographically, the changes have been terrible.
It’s not uniformly worse than it was a decade ago; there are some areas like highlighting business districts and such where in the last decade they’ve— uh— caught up with paper maps. But if Google Maps presented me with a “show maps like they were ten years ago” option, I’d enable it in an instant, because the cons of the last decade have been far greater than the pros for how I, all my family and most of my friends use it.
Yes seriously. Does nobody remember MapQuest? Even that was revolutionary compared to what came before, but had no ability to move the map dynamically, and this was the state of the art until Google Maps launched. I remember sitting in an office with two other students and my graduate advisor the first time we used Google Maps, and our mouths were literally agape. My advisor said “the people who can make this work are going to run the world,” which was sort of accurate. Same feeling the first time I used a good capacitive-touch display with snapback and inertial scrolling: ideas that may seem obvious when you’ve used them for a lifetime, but sure aren’t obvious beforehand.
Map Quest got steam rolled by Google Maps when Google came out with an insanely better interface and the continued to improve upon it.
It will be difficult for anybody to claw a lead from Google Maps, but I would have had a hard time believing anybody could steal the entire market away from Map Quest once upon a time, either.
MapQuest didn't suck because of its UI model. MapQuest sucked because it was clunky, slow, and cluttered. Its implementation was crap.
When you look at today's MapQuest, they've largely corrected this. The maps are much less ugly, they now pick a (somewhat) reasonable level of detail based on your zoom level and moving around the map is fast whether you're using their joystick control or dragging the map.
The sad thing is, none of this is rocket science. It shouldn't have taken them this long to figure out. Google Maps steadily, inevitably eroded their market share and last I heard, they were 10% behind.
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