I wonder how much this counted against an applicant.
In every substantial way, Google Maps was simply a better product than MapQuest from day one. Shockingly better. Would it be such an affront that MapQuest applicants should have a sense of taste?
Especially on the road to making their product better, if anything, using Google Maps should've been a bonus in an applicant's favor. Their sense of taste could move the organization forward.
It comes down to this bit of dialogue written by Aaron Sorkin: "If you're stupid, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you."
The Google Maps debut product was so astonishingly good it instantly changed user behavior. You had to use it just once to realize everything that came before was insultingly bad. Immediate loyalty. It was a cataclysmic shift in the space.
So, if it's me, and I'm hiring at MapQuest, and I have IQ that's expressed with at least two digits, I'm in a desperate search for smart people to come help me turn the ship. If they're using the competitor's product, that's fucking awesome. We're going to need as much competitive insight as we can get to make this turd into something people want to use again.
The problem is that they can't change the UI model without pissing off their existing userbase that likes clicking cardinal arrows to shift the map tiles around. Google's never going to implement that interface, even their nojs interface uses a different UI model.
If Mapquest's users wanted GMaps, they'd have switched by now. Aping that would only infuriate them, and since Google will always do a better job of implementing the rich JS interface than Mapquest can, the previously-recalcitrant users would just switch.
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.
I stopped using MapQuest because I got tired of the errors in it - locations were often a mile or more away from where MapQuest said they were, leaving me driving around in circles.
In every substantial way, Google Maps was simply a better product than MapQuest from day one. Shockingly better. Would it be such an affront that MapQuest applicants should have a sense of taste?
Especially on the road to making their product better, if anything, using Google Maps should've been a bonus in an applicant's favor. Their sense of taste could move the organization forward.