But Microsoft made the mistake of tailoring Bing Maps to everyone, and - as a result - they lost sight of the business market that MapPoint had once held. It was Microsoft’s hope that Bing Maps would eventually compete with Google Maps, which hasn’t exactly panned out so far.Īt the end, MapPoint released a goodbye message urging their customers to use Bing Maps instead. In 2013, Microsoft was pouring resources into Bing, largely due to an ongoing arms race it was in with Google. Other softwares continued to grow in the consumer sector, but MapPoint remained the preferred tool of enterprise sales. For a while, things remained good for MapPoint. Microsoft ended up buying NextBase, at which point the NextBase team moved from England to the United States.
Mappoint 2013 trial update#
No - although the software still exists on devices across the world, there hasn’t been an update released since 2013, and the support lines were stopped in 2015. At the time, digital maps and GPS were largely unheard of outside of science fiction. This was all groundbreaking back when MapPoint was released. The ability to combine business data with demographics to find and target potential customers, and focus your business decisions.Mileage, drive times, and expenses calculators.Priced with an account fee of $250, some of those features included: It might not have been as slick as Google Maps is now, but it made up for it by being early and having a lot of features that even a lot of today’s GPS programs don’t offer. Microsoft MapPoint was a mapping software that allowed its users to view, edit, and manipulate maps using custom data, and then analyze it visually. So it made sense that, after receiving rave reviews from the media, MapPoint quickly blew up.Īccording to this New York Times article, MapPoint sold over 400,000 copies, making its mark as the top-selling consumer application on the market. The press loved it - nobody had ever seen graphics in software quite like this.
However, the NextBase team wanted to stand out from the marketplace as much as possible - so they focused on the visual instead.Īfter over seven months of coding, the crew managed to get together a working copy which team members then distributed to journalists. The team was entirely self-funded, and the founders often took outside jobs in order to supplement their income while they worked.ĭuring the late ’80s, most software programs were totally text-based. To facilitate the process, the team started a company called NextBase Limited, which focused on creating digital maps. In 1988, Mark Atherton and Ian Mercer started building the product that would later become MapPoint. Why did one of the biggest and best selling consumer softwares exit the scene as suddenly as it arrived? And, more importantly, what alternatives are salespeople supposed to use now? Then on one day in 2014, it disappeared from the world. Before long, it became one of the best-selling consumer applications in the market. As far as virality went back then, MapPoint went viral - at one point, half the computers in the United Kingdom were running it . Started by 5 friends in a garage in Esher, a small town in Surrey, England, Microsoft MapPoint was a massive hit almost as soon as it was released. Or at least, it was the problem people faced before Microsoft MapPoint was released. Tough, right? Yet that was exactly the problem facing most outside salespeople before smartphones became widespread.
Mappoint 2013 trial series#
Now imagine trying to plan your entire day around a series of these addresses - all without the benefit of Waze, Google Maps, or anything else smartphone-related.
Think for just a second about how you’d try to find someone nowadays with nothing more than an address to go off of. Still, there are many working in sales who can still recall the challenges of doing outside sales without the modern convenience of accessible GPS mapping. Remember the peaceful days of the floppy disk?įor some, that era is already ancient history, having grown up in the internet and cell phone age.
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