Mapping isn't the hard part or the expensive part, the hardware is. Smartphones have GPS and when people started getting smartphones, the value of having a separate navigation devices went to zero-ish unless it's built in to your car or maybe some low power thing for wilderness exploration (or having a boat or a plane or that kind of thing)
Not sure if free mapping really existed as an accessible (mobile) product, considering that nearly everyone had to buy the mapdata from dedicated companies (Navteq and TeleAtlas dominated the market, Navteq was later acquired by Nokia, TeleAtlas by TomTom)
In any case, free NAVIGATION didn't exist until Google Maps came along, completely disrupting the whole industry of "casual" Navigation solutions.
Hardware wasn't even the issue, companies worked out profitable compact hardware solutions, introduced different tiers from Entry to Premium and in parallel TomTom (and Wayfinder et al) started to offer Navigation as a subscription service directly and as white-label via mobile carriers, with applications for J2ME, Windows PPC, Series60 (Nokia, Samsung,..), Symbian UIQ (Sony, Motorola).
They had a robust offering, quality maps and plenty of added datasets like POI, speed-information, radar-warning,... (anyone remembers the celebrity voice packages?)
Then Google opened Navigation as public beta, grabbed a huge chunk of this market and later added offline maps to grab another chunk of it (for navigation in international roaming).
The quality was far below any competitor, but it was free and for occasional use totally sufficient...
Search existed before Google as well. Free maps were very inferior to Google maps and also were a loss leader for other service that’s MapQuest was trying to sell into enterprise and stuff.
Google maps was just another ad stream for Google and so was much easier to link to, embed everywhere. And had an innovative UI.
Before Google cranked up their prices Google maps got embedded everywhere. This was novel and not something that Mapquest and other existing maps promoted.
Mapping isn't the hard part or the expensive part, the hardware is. Smartphones have GPS and when people started getting smartphones, the value of having a separate navigation devices went to zero-ish unless it's built in to your car or maybe some low power thing for wilderness exploration (or having a boat or a plane or that kind of thing)