Did Google Maps's "consistency" help it climb to #1 in maps?

Did Google Maps's "consistency" help it climb to #1 in maps?
41latitude.com

Before google maps, online maps were an insult to the user. You would get a 200px by 200px image of a crappy map surrounded by 10 ads that flashed at you. If you wanted to scroll to the right you had to click an arrow. It would then take about 30 seconds for the map and adds to reload.

Google did maps right, and eventually yahoo and map quest followed, but by the time they did it was too late everyone was using google maps and had no reason to switch.

Also before Google and Google Earth, online maps for many countries were not very good. Those with the data was not very interested in creating online maps.

Speed and ease of use is what made maps a killer product for me

I don't know... but it was actually an acquisition:

http://androidelectronics.com/tag/where-2-tech/

I don't expect feature labels to remain identical between views; the background intensity and purposes of the views are so different it makes sense to change their labeling. For example, there's less room for text if people are looking at the photographic detail between roads. (This also explains why some of Google's competitors move the road labels over roads on satellite views: it is reasonable to assume that people switched to satellite view to see non-road details, which you wouldn't want to obscure with labels.)

I also don't rapidly toggle between map and satellite views, and tend to look at the satellite views at a greater zoom than the map views.

Once you drop the idea such consistency is optimal, the causality could be the reverse: because the other services are behind in usership, they're being more innovative in optimizing satellite labeling.