AOL Trims Mapquest Unit (TWX)

They should fire all of Mapquest - those directions suck!

@muffman: tell that to the 50 million people who visit mapquest each month

Mapquest market share has declined from 60% to 50% from Jan 2007 till now, while Google Maps has grown 10% - can we say shareshift,tailfins?

Mapquest was a great property that AOL has mismanaged tremendously.

To have such a great foundation for local search and not leverage it is a sin.

Not a shareshift yet, Mapper. Google has gained considerable ground, but they're still significantly behind.

It's less a case of AOL mismanaging MapQuest than of acting with gross negligence and treating it a a cash cow. It's margins have been greater than 70% for years, but they never were allowed to reinvest in the company. That's the main reason for the realignment now; regardless of any "insider" may say, if you have to cut people who are doing productive work in order to hire others who are needed for even higher priority work--and you are making enough money to fund the additional hires--then you're in trouble.

And the correct number is 6, all from the Denver HQ.

~A real insider

Tailfins: I would, but they're all lost! LOL ......

@NoTime4Fools:

Google Maps has been number one worldwide for a while. With driving directions increasingly moving into car dashboards, it is not looking good for MapQuest's future, either.

There isn't an online map service on Earth that can find my house - I've tried them all. MapQuest sends you to one side of town while Google Maps sends you to the other. But if I had to choose MapQuest sucks more.

I used MapQuest tonight to try to find directions for a neighbor who is without Internet - and it sucked so bad we wound up cracking open the phone book (remember those? they're thick and heavy with local phone numbers and addresses and even have local maps). We finally pinned down the location our neighbor needed by studying the appropriate section of town on one particular map.

The old-fashioned way took us under two minutes. It took MapQuest over five minutes just to load three maps and confuse the crap out of everyone.

@notime4fools - the numbers speak for themselves. Mapquest loses share, and Google gains it - all the data providers validate this (Comscore etc.). That's shareshift, pure and simple. Does it mean that Mapquest isn't still large? No, but it does mean the trend is not your friend, and running a strategic asset as a cash cow (and letting this not-so-gradual customer erosion occur) when local and geocoding are just starting to hit their prime is one mighty bad move!

These fools... great margin, but never allowed to reinvest in the business... Were you talking about the dial up access business or mapquest? are they gonna share the same fate? Oh wait, they are not that foolish, they've seen the numbers and do not expect growth, googlemap or not, that's why they are not investing. driving direction is commodity stuff, consumers are chasing GPS based apps, which, unfortunately has little need for mapquest.

So 5 (five?) people are being re-organized? And THIS is news at SAI? OMG, that's ridiculous. Don't you have anything serious to report?

@noblow - please, AOL Corp Comm troll, play elsewhere!

Say what you will about their lack of features, UI, too many ads, but the driving directions are where they do shine. In fact I use Map Quest for driving directions, Google Maps for panning and browsing (plus dragging a route to fine tune it), and MS Live for their very cool Bird's Eye View. It would be nice if one mapping site had it all--but none of them do.

What is happening at MapQuest is a symptom of what is going on across AOL. Continuous talent drain, and inability to attract any new talent. Middle, and sometime very senior management, are amateurs who would run a lemonade stand into the ground. Case and point, at MapQuest, they hired a product manager from Yahoo, another disaster by itself, to be their VP of products. Wonder why the product sucks?

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