This allows her living map, as she defines it, to be present on every trip, but above all on the top of mind of consumers. Just Uberwith eight years of existence, is used by more than 8 million users and 200,000 drivers and delivery men in more than 70 cities in the Mexican Republic.
Didi It has completed more than 1,000 million trips in the four years it has been in operation. In its ranks there are more than 350,000 drivers and delivery men, in addition to 10 million active passengers on the platform, according to data from the same companies.
Since 2020, Didi has positioned itself as the most used mobility app by passengers and drivers. In addition, it is a leader in downloads with 50% more annual volume than the closest competitor, according to data.ai (formerly App Annie), a company in mobile application data analysis solutions.
How does Waze deal with resistance in the use of the app, by traditional taxi drivers who are baby boomers? “It is a generational issue. Many suddenly perceive that the Waze map has several elements and prefer interfaces that are simpler, but when they find the value of what we offer, routing with what is happening at that moment, they understand it”, says Avilés. “So I don’t have an answer to the question as such, but I can give the general context of use, based on what we observed.”
It’s not that Waze is doing it wrong, says Luis Felipe Díaz Muñoz, a marketing specialist and professor of Business Management at the Escuela Bancaria y Comercial (EBC). What happens, he says, is that the so-called baby boomers they were brought up with a certain way of thinking. The baby boomers they are reluctant to use Waze because they carry an imprint that they have to do things on their own, so they do not accept so easily that someone else does something for them.
And it doesn’t just happen in terms of mobility, he adds, today it is very rare for a baby boomers wash your clothes in a laundromat, contrary to the younger generation who prefer to wash in these establishments instead of buying a washing machine.
“With the pandemic, these generations had to use certain technology, for example, to make purchases online, but they did it through a third party, since they continue to have this mistrust of technology. His motto is: if I don’t do it, it won’t work out. If I want to make rice, I do it. I don’t see a tutorial,” she details.
The Roji Guide, does it still exist?
For the expert consulted, the Roji Guide could be a museum piece. It is a booklet with an index, which was accompanied by a folded map containing the name and layout of streets, avenues, squares, tram routes, etc.
When hearing Roji Guide, it is associated with the map, but it is actually the name of a blueprint production company that was created by Joaquin Palacios Roji Lara. In 1993, the company launched an electronic map of Mexico City on CD, four years later it enabled an electronic portal and already offered maps of Guadalajara, Monterrey and the country’s capital.
The company began to falter in 2013, when one of the partners died and there was no agreement between the founder’s heirs. Nor did he manage to face the innovation of those years, nor the adoption of new technologies to make his iconic map more dynamic, although he did manage to extend his lines to other places in the Mexican Republic such as San Luis Potosí, Puebla, Querétaro, Cuernavaca. , Leon, Toluca, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.
The company entered commercial bankruptcy in 2017 and declared bankruptcy before the 7th District Court in Civil Matters, in the State of Jalisco in 2018. “It is not that the baby boomers has been very attached to the use of the Roji Guide”, says Díaz Muñoz. But the connection he may have had with this generation is that the baby boomers they do not usually ask how to get to an address. “For them it is still easier to read a Roji Guide than to trust an app because it is a way to solve on their own,” he reiterates.
