From Tedium, May 13:
How MapQuest, a company innovative enough to kill road atlases in one fell swoop, was turned into an also-ran by a bad merger affected by an even worse one.
Today in Tedium: Let’s talk about maps. When I was seven years old, giant road atlases were my idea of a good time. They were filled with maps of places I’ve never been and perhaps would never see in person. One of my favorite ways to use them was to follow a road in one city and see how far I could follow it as I scrolled through the pages of the book. (As an adult, I would recreate this activity with Wikipedia.) But in the 1990s, the nature of mapping forever changed because of a technology that quickly became one of the internet’s first major success stories. It’s still around today—but within a decade of its launch, Google had completely eaten its lunch. Lost in this tale: the technology itself was an impressive defensive measure that came from an industry at risk of disruption. Alas, the disruption came for them anyway. Today’s Tedium considers the fate of MapQuest, the RC Cola of mapping apps. — Ernie @ Tedium
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A map of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the center of the cartographic universe, as far as this story goes.
The roots of MapQuest go back to the history of commercial cartography
Today, the concept of combining global positioning systems with computer-based maps is so intertwined that it’s impossible to disconnect the two. But at first, loading a map on a computer wasn’t so instant and automatic, at least for the end user.
MapQuest did a lot of the work that got us there. It was the first mainstream service that allowed companies to easily display their location on a website without drawing it themselves. It was also a dead-simple way to create a shareable set of directions.
And it sold a lot of us on the idea of printing out a list of directions on our home printer, rather than buying a road map or atlas. Before the smartphone became the mapping tool du jour, it was the way to figure out where you needed to go if you were on a long journey.
But the roots of MapQuest appeared thanks to a company we actually mentioned fairly recently. R.R. Donnelley, the namesake company of 19th-century publishing entrepreneur Richard Robert Donnelley, successfully pivoted a legacy cartography business to the digital age.
(His son, Reuben H. Donnelley, helped popularize the commercial phone book under a separate namesake business. It’s sort of fitting that they each dominated a key legacy print medium.)
The roots of what became MapQuest came about in the late 1960s, when R.R. Donnelley decided to split off its mapmaking expertise, fostered to meet the needs of the oil industry, into its own subsidiary based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At the time, Donnelley’s cartographic services arm was doing something unique in the mapping industry: It was a map-for-hire service. If you wanted a map of something—say, your business—it was positioned to do the work for you. As a 1974 profile on the company, featuring an interview with then-director Duncan M. Fitchet, put it:
Fitchet called the Lancaster mapmaking facility “unique.”
“There’s no other facility quite like ours in the country,” he added. “While other companies make maps to be published by themselves, we’re actively in the business of selling commercial cartography to publishers.”
He explained that companies like Rand McNally make maps to be printed in their own publications—atlases and textbooks. On the other hand, publishing companies or authors needing a map come to Donnelley and, for a fee, cartographic services makes it.
This actually dovetailed nicely into Donnelley’s business, which leaned hard into commercial printing at a time when it was largely an industrial concern....
....MUCH MORE
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