MapQuest GM goes where his app says: Lake Ontario

When MapQuest’s general manager woke up in Toronto on Thursday morning, the Texan visiting for a conference knew he couldn’t leave without visiting one place.

Doug Berger made a beeline south from his hotel, wandering past the dock where the ill-fated Captain John’s restaurant used to moor and heading deeper toward the city’s shoreline.

The vast body of water he arrived at — Lake Ontario — was an essential stop for Berger because it made his company the talk of the tech world and beyond last month. Unlike many of its rivals, MapQuest had rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s name change to Lake America.

“It’s what gave MapQuest this moment,” Berger said of the lake as he walked toward the waterfront for a second time Thursday. “I just wanted to get over there and mark the moment.”

That moment began in the dying days of August, when the MapQuest team started monitoring Trump after he said he was “giving serious consideration” to swapping the lake’s name.

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MapQuest had been through this before. Last January, Trump ditched the Gulf of Mexico moniker in favour of Gulf of America. MapQuest stuck with the original name because it wanted to give users familiarity and its navigation products “integrity,” Berger said.

MapQuest makes name changes all the time as roads get built, buildings are demolished and new tracts of land are settled, but the political nature of Trump’s Lake Ontario edict felt different, he reasoned.

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When the team discussed how to handle a change, if one ever came to fruition, they made the “pretty easy decision” to ignore it.

“It’s one of the Great Lakes. There are acronyms like HOMES, and this is the ‘O,'” Berger explained, almost exasperated.

“Because of the location and because Canada’s our friendly neighbour to the north … renaming it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to us and we saw it as another moment for MapQuest to kind of take a stand.”

Two days later, when Trump signed his executive order christening the body of water Lake America, it took the company mere minutes to post a map of Lake Ontario with the caption, “we’re not changing it.”

Meanwhile, Google and Apple adopted “Lake America” for users in the United States while retaining Lake Ontario for those in Canada.

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Berger said he knew MapQuest was going to be the outlier, using Lake Ontario everywhere in the world.

With roughly 50 staff, he said his company has a nimbler team and more independence in general than the tech giants, which Berger estimates have thousands of staff working on mapping alone and under more pressure.

MapQuest’s decision paid off.

Three million new users, including many Canadians, have downloaded the app since the executive order. Many told Berger they respected that the company kept the Lake Ontario name.

Their support became like “lightning in a bottle” for the MapQuest team, who soon started selling “We’re not changing it” mugs, sweaters and T-shirts.

But the team was also anxious not to let this moment pass.

Thirty years ago, MapQuest was spun out of R.R. Donnelley & Sons, a commercial printing business dating back to the 19th century. It is now owned by System1, a California-based advertising company.

While decades ago, MapQuest was a dominant name in the world of navigation services, the evolution of smartphones and GPS products for cars, as well as the rise of rivals, has diminished much of the business’s lustre.

Some young people had never heard of the app when the Lake Ontario moment happened, but if you are over 30, Berger said, there’s a good chance you remember being in the family car “being yelled at to turn right in 0.1 miles and you still have the printouts.”

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MapQuest still delivers directions to users but now there’s no need for a printout. Customers can generate the company’s maps on a phone or its app.

And thanks to all those new users, the maps are getting even better than before, Berger said.

Very recent feedback from consumers, particularly those in Toronto, encouraged the company to add local transit options to its maps and offer support for Android Auto, a mobile app that mirrors a car’s dashboard.

While MapQuest is revelling in all the feedback and attention the Lake Ontario renaming has brought, Berger thinks one of the best parts has been how interested people are in the discussions MapQuest staff have every day.