Wrong Merger, Wrong Direction

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.

By the late 1970s, the company was running quite the operation, despite utilizing a staff of just 25 people. The company had 75,000 maps in its archive and a significant library of reference books. The company was clearly well-positioned to digitize its library, which is exactly what it did, starting in the early ’80s.

The 1980s were an important time in the mapping industry, with innovations in digital mapping creating new frontiers in map development. And of course, global positioning systems were starting to emerge—further allowing new ways of generating maps based on global coordinates.

Donnelley’s big pivot happened in the late 1980s, thanks to a guy named Barry J. Glick. An academic who spent years at schools like SUNY Buffalo and Cornell, he became an expert researcher on spatial systems, becoming an expert on the topic. By the late 1980s, he started a company called Spatial Data Sciences, which specialized in the gathering of digital road map data. This data obviously had significant commercial value, which SDS leaned into.

(Side note: Something highly ironic about the fact that one of the first for Spatial Data Sciences on Google was a MapQuest listing of its original headquarters. Just … chef’s kiss.)

Per Map Happenings, Glick reached out to the two major mapmakers of the era–R.R. Donnnelley and Rand McNally—to see if they might be interested in his technology. Rand McNally passed, though Glick made up for it decades later by joining its board. Donnnelley signed on, creating a joint partnership called GeoSystems.

Glick’s decision to work with Donnelley actually gave him a huge advantage for what MapQuest would become. See, Donnelley already had a business relationship with Apple, having produced maps for the company’s platforms. The firm also printed at least some of Apple’s catalogs. (The relationship was apparently long-lasting, given the unexpected revelation in 2018 that Donnelley had managed Apple’s custom photo-printing service behind the scenes.)

So it only makes sense, perhaps, that when Apple first attempted to make handheld computing useful, Donnelley’s GeoSystems was one of the first companies on the list. In a 1992 profile on GeoSystems in the Lancaster New Era, Glick made it clear that it saw the work with a strong partner that would help the company meet its goals as a mapping innovator.

“Our objective is to become a major player in the information industry,” Glick said. “And if we’re successful (with Apple), it’s going to lead to significant growth.”

As the piece noted, the company had started to grow so quickly that it needed a new office to hold all the people. The next step? A big hit to justify all the hiring.

The Apple Newton, of course, wasn’t the Apple device that would bring this idea to the masses—and GeoSystems wasn’t the company that would make the default app on the device that did.

But it wouldn’t stop GeoSystems from becoming a dominant player in mapping—under a different name, and with a different product.

How MapQuest made GIS accessible to the masses—and how AOL screwed it up

At the time MapQuest came out, there was a huge divide in what was accessible to the consumer and what one could access as a commercial customer. The growth of geographic information software—highly expensive, specialized software—had deeply changed the mapping industry throughout the 1980s, including at companies like R.R. Donnelley, which had evolved its mapping-for-hire business into GeoSystems Global.

While the Apple Newton didn’t exactly set the world ablaze, the fact that GeoSystems hopped onto it highlighted its broader vision, which it only expanded on after spinning off from Donnelley in 1994. It saw GIS software as something consumers should have access to—and the internet was its way of doing it.

The initial MapQuest, while primitive by today’s standards, allowed consumers to search for a location and pull up a map highlighting that location. Its TripQuest functionality allowed consumers to build directions for themselves that they could then print out. Launched in 1996, it became a household name in about a year—disrupting the print map and atlas industry in one fell swoop.

It was an excellent example of a company from a legacy industry successfully pivoting to a new era without losing its shirt. It even spawned close imitators. Vicinity’s MapBlast, launched around the same time, was later scooped up by Microsoft, launching what became MSN Maps and Bing Maps.

And in a way, GeoSystems had also managed to even maintain its legacy map-for-hire offering. A 1996 Computerworld profile on GeoSystems’ commercial offering, mentioned with a competitor named Vicinity, explained how the company was making it possible for brick-and-mortar retailers like The Sharper Image to list each of their retail locations with a map. The company charged between $6,000 and $20,000 for its various offerings.

It was a model that made sense for them. Within a decade, Google would offer this embedding function as a free basic feature of Google Maps.

This MapQuest commercial is 16 years old and has less than 500 views on YouTube. Presumably, until now.

It is shocking how quickly MapQuest became a household name in retrospect. By the fall of 1998, the site received 4.5 million visitors a month, and GeoSystems publicly considered the company’s name to MapQuest, which it eventually did.

The problem with most technology of that era, from a business standpoint, is pretty basic: Tech companies of that era did not know how to harness that success over the long haul. In that light, MapQuest’s path looks like an excellent cautionary tale. The downfall happened in four parts:

1. The stock market entrance. Mere months after GeoSystems changed its name to MapQuest, the company announced its plans to enter the stock market, with a goal of diversifying into business services. Its revenue was positive, but modest.
2. The AOL acquisition. At the end of 1999, AOL announced its plans to acquire MapQuest for an eye-watering $1.1 billion. It was a huge deal that would have been even better if the all-stock deal had not been announced right before the stock market crashed, tanking the deal’s value. (It was also less than MapQuest was worth based on then-current stock prices.)
3. The AOL-Time Warner merger. It was already disruptive enough for AOL to buy your company, but one does not expect AOL to merge with an even bigger company before your deal even closes. But a mere three weeks after the MapQuest deal was announced, AOL agreed to merge with Time Warner, an embarrassingly audacious merger that ended up harming both companies. Among other things, it discouraged innovation and misunderstood the value of subsidiaries like MapQuest and Netscape—and the merger was soon undone. (As Killick put it, AOL only seemed to care about ad views.)
4. Disruption sets in. On his blog Map Happenings, Killick noted that MapQuest’s reliance on third-party data left it vulnerable to companies that could innovate more effectively than them, and Google definitely fits the bill. When the company launched Google Maps in 2005, its big innovation was something that MapQuest was not designed to do—pan a map to whatever location you wanted without changing a page. Of course, it won—and that was far from the last feature it added. Less than two years after its release, the iPhone was announced—and it had Google Maps, not MapQuest.

MapQuest lost a lot of ground thanks to a cursed merger, one that sapped an innovative company of resources and motivation. It effectively dumbed down a disruption-proof model to its most basic parts. (That business services offering? Forget about it, we’re selling ad impressions now.)

When all was said and done, it wasn’t even a billion-dollar deal anymore!

Given MapQuest’s roots as a company borne from a major publisher, it had the business parts worked out in ways that actually made sense. If one company had to dominate the online mapping space, it should have been the one built by the company that effectively started as a cartography-for-hire business. But once AOL acquired them, it did not matter—to MapQuest’s eventual peril.

Surprisingly, given all that, MapQuest is still a going concern.