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. 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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