I am constantly astonished by the fact that many websites still use Mapquest on their “directions” pages. It makes me wonder why they do so, when surely no-one really uses Mapquest anymore when there are alternatives like Google Maps and Yahoo Maps around. For several years now, those two alternatives have been considerably better options, with a much more usable interface (both on PCs and on mobile devices) and much higher quality maps (Mapquest’s were until very recently still those funny line drawings where roads are shown as single lines instead of two dimensional objects although this appears to have changed in the last couple of months).

And yet, according to Hitwise, Mapquest still has an over 50% share of the online mapping market. Google Maps, while coming up quickly, is still around 20%. Yahoo Maps, which had been in second place, has recently dropped to third, losing subscribers to Google along with Mapquest itself. Microsoft’s Live Maps product, meanwhile, is hovering around 3% of the market.

I found this astonishing, because I’m not sure I’ve ever used Mapquest, and I certainly never have in the last 5 years. For a time, Google Maps and Yahoo Maps were playing leapfrog in courting my attention by launching new features alternately. But Mapquest was never a serious contender. So why is Mapquest still such a major player?

I think the answer lies in the fact that many people on the Internet are inherently inert when it comes to choosing service providers. Their inertia ties them to the first service they used that worked in a particular space - be it mapping, search or photo sharing. They don’t actively seek out alternatives and so never realize that there are better services available. In the case of Mapquest, it was so dominant in the early days that its name transcended its brand and became generic in the manner of Kleenex, Hoover or Ziploc (”shall I give you directions?” - “no - I’ll just Mapquest it”).

I think this same inertia is what has allowed AOL (coincidentally, the owner of Mapquest) to continue to exist as a walled garden provider even when the same content and services that you can pay $10 to $26 a month for is now available for free at aol.com. The same group of subscribers probably make up much of the customer base for both Mapquest and the old AOL service. And this group of relatively inert Internet users is large and probably growing as more seniors and others who are less adventurous on the net come online.

This all gives a massive advantage to the first company that makes a significant new service work well enough for these relatively conservative users of the Internet. Google is able to overcome this advantage in the case of mapping and other areas such as email because it already has a strong entrenched position in search and is good at leveraging its strength across its properties through those links at the top left of each of its pages.

This is in contrast to Yahoo!, whose website is so cluttered that finding new services is very much more difficult. There are lessons to be learned both from Mapquest and from Google here. From Mapquest we can learn that being the first good provider of an online service is a massive advantage. But from Google we can learn that it is possible to overcome that advantage by leveraging mind share in an existing market into an adjacent one. And we can also learn that the time to market for competing services is very much shorter today than it was when Mapquest first launched, so that the first mover advantage is being eroded over time.

Service providers on the Internet have essentially two choices: they can target this large group of inert users, which takes a long time to jump on a bandwagon but will then ride it for many years, or to target the equally large group of more technically savvy users who are more adventurous and therefore faster to adopt a new service but also faster to jump ship when something better comes along. A third option, the holy grail, is to produce a service which serves both markets and can therefore grow quickly but also retain a large base over time. But that’s a rare service indeed.