Google Maps was a revolutionary product that popularized the category, they had no competition when it was released, at least now there's Apple Maps, Open Street Map, Bing Maps, Tencent Maps.
I was developing with ESRI ArcGIS at the time, ESRI was a multi-billion dollar GEO company who had no product that even came close to the instant utility Google Maps launched with.
The only other product that had a similar "Wow" factor around the same time was Keyhole which we were using before Google acquired them and used it to launch "Google Earth".
If anything Google Maps spawned competition in the last decade, the existing competitors like ESRI are still developing their GEO products for Internal/Enterprise use, but now there are a number of competing consumer mapping services that provide the same utility and functionality of Google Maps from large technology companies that didn't have GEO as part of their competency like: Apple Maps, Bing Maps and Tencent Maps.
I just finished reading "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality" (https://amzn.com/0062673041) about the evolution of Google Earth, Maps, and Street View. Written by one of the founders of Keyhole (the company that built what became Google Earth), the book is mostly about the founding of Keyhole and its mapping technology, but it has some insider info about the political maneuverings between Google's Search and Geo teams over owning the map ads because everyone knew it would be a big deal. The book is pretty interesting, but light on the technical details.
There were multiple competing products when Google Maps was released, so they had competition. Google's product was simply better at than most alternatives at the time.
There was no real-time Consumer Maps App that came close to competing with Google Maps UX. Now there are multiple Consumer Mapping Services that replicate the instant utility of Google Maps, but it was revolutionary with no equal at the time.
As I'm being down voted without any discussion I'll remove why none of the existing competition did or could've done what Google Maps did and keep the insights I had at the time as a GEO developer to myself. Fly-by downvoters can continue believing the revisionist history they wish to.
Feel free to believe Google Maps had competition (they didn't), nothing else at the time provided the same instant utility of Google Maps which basically ushered in the new category of "real-time search-based Consumer Maps" of which there are plenty now.
Anything that existed previously would've needed a rewrite to achieve the same instant utility of Google Maps. Nothing without it could've become mainstream. The competition like ESRI still doesn't have it, but they're still focused on Internal/Enterprise Usage, they let you build GEO Maps but they don't let you build consumer maps that compete with Google Maps.
You're agreeing with me here by admitting that there was existing competition. The rest of your remarks are about how much better Google's offering was to the competition, which is a point I've already agreed with.
That's like saying a DB search is existing competition for a Google Search, it isn't.
There were existing GEO companies that provided Mapping Services (I was developing GEO Apps with one of them at the time), but there was nothing like the consumer focused Google's Maps preceding it, with its worldwide pre-rendered imagery at multiple zoom-levels coupled with a global search that displayed annotated Markup results delivered over an Ajax Web interface that allowed seamless panning/zooming of the Earth scaled to millions of users.
It wasn't a fluke that Google Maps gained instant popularity with mainstream Internet users over everything else, there was nothing else like it.
> That's like saying a DB search is existing competition for a Google Search
If by "DB search" you mean the old-school engines like Lycos, etc., then yes, it is like saying that. And yes, I think those did count as existing competition for Google search.
I suspect that we mean different things by "competition" here...
As an avid user of mapquest back in the day, the user experience that google provided (tiled maps that could be panned/zoomed seamlessly) was absolutely revolutionary and the clincher for me.
Mapquest back then had the clunky “click the big arrow” to move the map and reload the page navigation...
The instant utility was essential to its massive popularity, it basically ushered in the new era for real-time Consumer mapping. Everything preceding it was clunky, slow and "turn based". I can't recall what the state of MapQuest was at the time, but it's unlikely it had the real-time UX or utility of Google Maps.
Was a real eye-opener of "so that's how you make Maps fast" at the time, just pre-render the entire world at multiple static zoom levels. Which wasn't an option (disk cost) for anyone developing their own in-house mapping Services at the time. For my next GEO project I did the next best thing and used their Google Maps API to change it to make map tile requests to our ArcGIS App which dynamically cached map tiles on the fly, so whilst it didn't pre-render all tiles, it provided a nice "Google Maps"-like UX for popular areas of our region.
Multimap and Streetmap in the UK both had prerendered tiles at multiple zoom levels years before Google. I'd developed a smooth "slippy map" at my then employer (waterscape.com) before Google Maps was released, using Flash and the Ming authoring interface, but IIRC Google released before we did.
