6 ms·

"[Apple's] problem is that they thought they did not have a problem." Crucial insight, there. From the perspective of an observer who has no special affection

"[Apple's] problem is that they thought they did not have a problem." Crucial insight, there. From the perspective of an observer who has no special affection for Apple, it's surprising that a company of that competence would succumb to such a basic process error.

peteretep 14y ago
This is the first event that people will put down to a lack of Steve Jobs that I think actually might reflect that...
- 0x006A 14y ago
  the decision to switch to there own maps was made while jobs was around. its also not the first time apple replaces a product with an inferior option and insists its better, final cut pro x comes to mind.
  - agumonkey 14y ago
    Didn't they address user concerns with a .1 upgrade or was it a placebo pill ?
    - 0x006A 14y ago
      nothing really changed with .1, they added some placebo fixes, like xml import/export (except that its a new xml format that only represents trivial edits and thus is useless).
  - peteretep 14y ago
    Yes, but not the decision to ship it in its current form.
- dasil003 14y ago
  Would Jobs have the balls to release iOS 6 with no Maps at all for a year or more while they scramble to catch up? Those would be some huge cajones.
  - bambax 14y ago
    Jobs didn't exactly lack "cajones" but there were other approaches than just "no maps at all" - try to make the deal with Google happen; Apple has so much money it's hard to understand why they couldn't buy their way into Google Maps for another year or two - make a deal with someone else (Microsoft / Bing Maps, other map provider) while still working on their own, in-house solution It's great that Apple decided to build its own map system; the problem is they released it when it was far from ready; Apple didn't use to present half-baked products to the world.
    - kristianc 14y ago
      You obviously don't remember the first iPhone.
      - stcredzero 14y ago
        I bought it. It was an MVP. The M stands for Minimal. The V stands for Viable. I still have it and note that Maps in iOS 3 over EDGE is more responsive and slicker looking than Maps in iOS 5.
        kristianc 14y ago
        Oh, so when it suits your argument it's an MVP, when it doesn't, it's half baked. Got it.
        stcredzero 14y ago
        > Oh, so when it suits your argument it's an MVP, when it doesn't, it's half baked. Got it. Nice straw man and shoving words into another's mouth. When the product suits one's purpose, it's viable. When it doesn't, it's half baked. When the original iPhone was released, the bar for viable was much lower. Other smartphones were a mess, UX-wise. Just fixing the UX with a smaller feature set won over a mainstream audience. Now, the bar for viable is much higher, and it carries the expectations of a Maps application that works at least as well as Google Maps for iOS. Customer expectations change over time. Pretending that they don't for the sake of argument is either foolish or dishonest.
saurik 14y ago
Apple actually makes this kind of mistake often: they positively excel at some things (retail relationships, hardware supply chains, physical design, software integration) but really suck at other things (social experiences, data harvesting and search, data synchronization and security, dealing with developers): even "within" the Apple community this leads to a number of well-known failures, from Ping (a similar situation to Maps, with Apple suddenly being forced to compete with Facebook as a deal fell through for functionality they considered critical) to MobileMe (now replaced by iCloud, which has its own set of glaring issues which, if you haven't noticed them now, you might the first time you need to restore an 8GB iCloud backup "all-or-nothing" on the same day tens of millions of other users are attempting to restore their devices with a new version of the firmware).
- dvanduzer 14y ago
  There's plenty worth criticizing about Apple, but you didn't even mention radar:// 1) "Social Experiences" - Ping failed where... who succeeded? 2) "Data Harvesting and Search" - These are two terms that are either exactly the same, or extremely different. Neither points at a clear criticism. You realize Apple pioneered desktop search, right? 3) "Data synchronization" - Where's the problem, exactly? Is there any company other than Dropbox that can claim the crown for this? Do you know how hard this is? Who is third place after Apple's second? 4) "and Security" - Again. Huh? 5) I'm terribly sorry you had a software failure and only had a single solitary backup of 8GB of your vital that was difficult to retrieve when Apple was clearly spiking 8 petabytes of traffic in one day. In this clearly entirely hypothetical scenario you've invented. I hate defending the only company that finally brought UNIX to the desktop just because I happen to wear designer glasses.
  - saurik 14y ago
    1) Many other companies have succeeded at getting social to work: Ping did not; do you use Ping? I explicitly go into the story with regards to Ping. I know of no one who considers Ping a success. http://www.powayiliad.com/2011/01/itunes-ping-an-apple-failure/ http://www.powayiliad.com/2011/01/itunes-ping-an-apple-failu... http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/ping-fail-5-reasons-to-avoid-joining-apples-soci http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/ping-fail-5-reasons-to-avoid-j... Even Apple considers Ping a failure, so I'm really not certain where you are trying to go with your argument. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/apple-declares-ping-failure-remove-software-184828124.html http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/apple-declares-p... 2) Apple is fairly good at doing things on the desktop, however their server work leaves much to be desired: the way they attempt to rank search results in their various online store fronts is a commonly cited example of this. I have explicitly been told by people at Apple "we are not server people" when reporting issues. (Also, "harvesting" is the collection of data, and "search" is the process of finding data you need in the massive pile you have collected: these are orthogonal concepts.) 3) There are so many issues with this that there is a small industry surrounding tools and teaching people hacks to make this work correctly; I'm kind of assuming you have sufficient context in the Apple community to know much about the specific issues, which is why I felt it was perfectly acceptable to just list "known failures" rather than having to say "this is how why this one failed". http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_solve_all_your_mobileme_sync_problems http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_solve_all_your_mob... http://www.cultofmac.com/82971/how-to-fix-mobileme-sync-problems-macrx/ http://www.cultofmac.com/82971/how-to-fix-mobileme-sync-prob... http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:discussions.apple.com+mobileme+sync+issues http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:discussions.apple.com+m... (12,600 results) 4) You realize who you are talking to, right? Do I really need to defend this? The sheer fact that I have been, for years, operating what is probably the largest private-sector man-in-the-middle attack ever (many tens of millions of devices worldwide, literally billions of stored signature blobs), on Apple's products, an attack that would be trivially solvable by techniques literally taught in intro-level encryption classes, should be sufficient (but of course when you do what I do you have tons of stories to tell). 5) I haven't had this happen to me, as I don't use iCloud: this has happened to numerous other people, however. Here is one example user (of many), from May, with the non-saurik names changed: --- Day changed Tue May 29 2012 01:04:34 <xxx> this iCloud shit is getting ridiculous 01:04:59 <saurik> xxx: ? 01:05:16 <xxx> saurik: I upgraded my phone, but my iCloud backup was 7GB, i've spent the last two days straight trying to restore it 01:05:38 <xxx> (if the download is interrupted for one second, it fails, and there is no download resume or anything similar or way to download to iTunes or anything) 01:05:50 <xxx> and on my slow internet, 7GB takes about 13 hours to download 01:06:10 <saurik> ouch 01:06:20 <lmrpq> I backup everything minus the Camera Roll, so my backups stay small. If I update, I use iTunes for a one off backup/restore. 01:06:56 <xxx> yeah; i should have disabled the camera roll 01:07:33 <xxx> saurik: I don't think it fails if the screen doesn't turn off, so right now I'm sitting with it for the ~9 remaining hours on my 7th attempt tapping the screen. 01:07:35 <lmrpq> However, the backup I made before upgrading to 5.1.1 turned out to be corrupt (wtf?) so I had to restore from iCloud minus Camera Roll. 01:07:46 <xxx> lmrpq: how do you restore minus camera roll?? 01:07:50 <xxx> oh, iTunes backup 01:08:02 <xxx> i want to restore from iCloud without camera roll, for maybe ~500mb 01:08:08 <lmrpq> No, my iCloud backups don't have camera roll, so I had to do that 01:08:12 <xxx> hmm 01:08:15 <lmrpq> I was not happy. 01:08:19 <xxx> maybe i could finish setup 01:08:20 <xxx> jailbreak it 01:08:26 <xxx> remove the "setup finished" flag 01:08:32 <xxx> hook into the setup script 01:08:41 <xxx> skip parts of the download 01:08:45 <xxx> :< 01:09:25 <xxx> hmm maybe i could also go somewhere with > 10mbps internet 01:09:37 <lmrpq> Apple has a lot of money. I wish they put some of it into making stellar cloud services. 01:11:18 <saurik> xxx: what kind of device? 01:13:03 <saurik> ah, I'm going to resume 4S? (as you said iphone) 01:13:47 <xxx> yaeh 01:13:55 <saurik> I guess its time for the drinking bird --- Day changed Wed May 30 2012 00:07:33 <xxx> iCloud restore failed. 00:07:37 <xxx> :( 00:07:42 <xxx> time to start again! The best part of the entire report (which you will note was still plaguing this user a day later, as near the end the timestamps reset for May 30th): 00:42:52 <xxx> all i really want is my chrono trigger save game :(
dasil003 14y ago
Is this true though? It's easy for everyone for all the armchair CEOs to say that Jobs never would have released such an epic fail, but I'm not so sure. If there's one thing that Apple hates as much as a half-baked UX, it's dependency on another tech company. It seems pretty obvious to me as a casual developer and observer of Google maps over the years that global mapping is really really hard. How could Apple not have known this? I don't think even they have this much hubris. Now we don't know why negotiations with Google for the maps API failed. Maybe Apple was overconfident, maybe Google was playing hard ball for Android's sake, maybe a bit of both. But regardless of the reason, the contract was not renewed and they had to release something. The iPhone without maps is not the iPhone. The fact that they used an algorithmic approach to QA says more about the timelines than Apple's beliefs about the overall best approach. There was simply not time to get people on the ground to do a proper QA job. Apple's hands were tied.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  Are Bing Maps this horrible? Couldn't they license those if they didn't have a choice? Or what about MapQuest? What about the maps used by GPS units? Couldn't they have made a deal with Garmin or Tomtom or someone like that? It may have taken more work than integration with Google, but it'd almost definitely take less work than starting from scratch. I definitely do not believe that their hands were tied and they were forced into creating their own shoddy, incomplete system. On top of all that, I think Google has more business intelligence than to actually let the contract for iOS maps go. Maybe both sides were just bluffing and never thought the one party would cut the other loose, or something like that, but you'd think with a deal this big at some point someone would come back with their tail between their legs and reopen negotiations. Of course, it's all speculation at this point anyway. It'd be nice if someone with knowledge could come in here and elucidate, though the likelihood of that is really small.
  - skeletonjelly 14y ago
    I thought Apple did have a relationship with Tomtom for this?
epo 14y ago
Apple is smarter than this. They would not have released such a half-baked replacement unless they were forced to. I suspect Google refused to renew knowing Apple were working on a replacement but were not yet ready. This is Apple's "Vista" moment and will inevitably draw the "wouldn't have happened under Jobs" comments. How Apple recovers will form business school study material for years to come.
- rahoulb 14y ago
  I'm not so sure they were forced to. I thought that too, initially, but another commenter somewhere else pointed out how hasty and nervy Google's "maps" announcement was, just before WWDC. In that context, it doesn't sound like something Google was wanting to happen.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    What we do know is that Google raised their general prices for map access since the original deal with Apple was made. If we assume Google also wanted to increase the rate for Apple's access, it seems logical that they would be upset that they lost a multimillion dollar deal.
batista 14y ago
>Crucial insight, there. From the perspective of an observer who has no special affection for Apple, it's surprising that a company of that competence would succumb to such a basic process error. What insight? Apple makes most of their stuff themselves -- or gets them from multiple sources. Maps were an exception, as a key technology that was in the hands of a competitor. But not because Apple could help it at the time: they made a foray into a new territory, mobile phones, and Google had all the available technology and was a non competitor at the time (the first Android phone was out a year later, Oct 2008). It's a few years that they have already started the process of moving to something of their own. They bought some mapping companies, etc. Something forced their hands to make the switch before that was over. In any case, you can't just jump over 8+ years of refinements that Google maps have (not to mention all the "driving endless miles for Google Street View and road info, etc).
sigzero 14y ago
I doubt that Apple was not aware of how good or bad their maps program was.

peteretep 14y ago

This is the first event that people will put down to a lack of Steve Jobs that I think actually might reflect that...

0x006A 14y ago
the decision to switch to there own maps was made while jobs was around. its also not the first time apple replaces a product with an inferior option and insists its better, final cut pro x comes to mind.
- agumonkey 14y ago
  Didn't they address user concerns with a .1 upgrade or was it a placebo pill ?
  - 0x006A 14y ago
    nothing really changed with .1, they added some placebo fixes, like xml import/export (except that its a new xml format that only represents trivial edits and thus is useless).
- peteretep 14y ago
  Yes, but not the decision to ship it in its current form.
dasil003 14y ago
Would Jobs have the balls to release iOS 6 with no Maps at all for a year or more while they scramble to catch up? Those would be some huge cajones.
- bambax 14y ago
  Jobs didn't exactly lack "cajones" but there were other approaches than just "no maps at all" - try to make the deal with Google happen; Apple has so much money it's hard to understand why they couldn't buy their way into Google Maps for another year or two - make a deal with someone else (Microsoft / Bing Maps, other map provider) while still working on their own, in-house solution It's great that Apple decided to build its own map system; the problem is they released it when it was far from ready; Apple didn't use to present half-baked products to the world.
  - kristianc 14y ago
    You obviously don't remember the first iPhone.
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      I bought it. It was an MVP. The M stands for Minimal. The V stands for Viable. I still have it and note that Maps in iOS 3 over EDGE is more responsive and slicker looking than Maps in iOS 5.
      - kristianc 14y ago
        Oh, so when it suits your argument it's an MVP, when it doesn't, it's half baked. Got it.
        stcredzero 14y ago
        > Oh, so when it suits your argument it's an MVP, when it doesn't, it's half baked. Got it. Nice straw man and shoving words into another's mouth. When the product suits one's purpose, it's viable. When it doesn't, it's half baked. When the original iPhone was released, the bar for viable was much lower. Other smartphones were a mess, UX-wise. Just fixing the UX with a smaller feature set won over a mainstream audience. Now, the bar for viable is much higher, and it carries the expectations of a Maps application that works at least as well as Google Maps for iOS. Customer expectations change over time. Pretending that they don't for the sake of argument is either foolish or dishonest.

saurik 14y ago

Apple actually makes this kind of mistake often: they positively excel at some things (retail relationships, hardware supply chains, physical design, software integration) but really suck at other things (social experiences, data harvesting and search, data synchronization and security, dealing with developers): even "within" the Apple community this leads to a number of well-known failures, from Ping (a similar situation to Maps, with Apple suddenly being forced to compete with Facebook as a deal fell through for functionality they considered critical) to MobileMe (now replaced by iCloud, which has its own set of glaring issues which, if you haven't noticed them now, you might the first time you need to restore an 8GB iCloud backup "all-or-nothing" on the same day tens of millions of other users are attempting to restore their devices with a new version of the firmware).

dvanduzer 14y ago
There's plenty worth criticizing about Apple, but you didn't even mention radar:// 1) "Social Experiences" - Ping failed where... who succeeded? 2) "Data Harvesting and Search" - These are two terms that are either exactly the same, or extremely different. Neither points at a clear criticism. You realize Apple pioneered desktop search, right? 3) "Data synchronization" - Where's the problem, exactly? Is there any company other than Dropbox that can claim the crown for this? Do you know how hard this is? Who is third place after Apple's second? 4) "and Security" - Again. Huh? 5) I'm terribly sorry you had a software failure and only had a single solitary backup of 8GB of your vital that was difficult to retrieve when Apple was clearly spiking 8 petabytes of traffic in one day. In this clearly entirely hypothetical scenario you've invented. I hate defending the only company that finally brought UNIX to the desktop just because I happen to wear designer glasses.
- saurik 14y ago
  1) Many other companies have succeeded at getting social to work: Ping did not; do you use Ping? I explicitly go into the story with regards to Ping. I know of no one who considers Ping a success. http://www.powayiliad.com/2011/01/itunes-ping-an-apple-failure/ http://www.powayiliad.com/2011/01/itunes-ping-an-apple-failu... http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/ping-fail-5-reasons-to-avoid-joining-apples-soci http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/ping-fail-5-reasons-to-avoid-j... Even Apple considers Ping a failure, so I'm really not certain where you are trying to go with your argument. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/apple-declares-ping-failure-remove-software-184828124.html http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/apple-declares-p... 2) Apple is fairly good at doing things on the desktop, however their server work leaves much to be desired: the way they attempt to rank search results in their various online store fronts is a commonly cited example of this. I have explicitly been told by people at Apple "we are not server people" when reporting issues. (Also, "harvesting" is the collection of data, and "search" is the process of finding data you need in the massive pile you have collected: these are orthogonal concepts.) 3) There are so many issues with this that there is a small industry surrounding tools and teaching people hacks to make this work correctly; I'm kind of assuming you have sufficient context in the Apple community to know much about the specific issues, which is why I felt it was perfectly acceptable to just list "known failures" rather than having to say "this is how why this one failed". http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_solve_all_your_mobileme_sync_problems http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_solve_all_your_mob... http://www.cultofmac.com/82971/how-to-fix-mobileme-sync-problems-macrx/ http://www.cultofmac.com/82971/how-to-fix-mobileme-sync-prob... http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:discussions.apple.com+mobileme+sync+issues http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:discussions.apple.com+m... (12,600 results) 4) You realize who you are talking to, right? Do I really need to defend this? The sheer fact that I have been, for years, operating what is probably the largest private-sector man-in-the-middle attack ever (many tens of millions of devices worldwide, literally billions of stored signature blobs), on Apple's products, an attack that would be trivially solvable by techniques literally taught in intro-level encryption classes, should be sufficient (but of course when you do what I do you have tons of stories to tell). 5) I haven't had this happen to me, as I don't use iCloud: this has happened to numerous other people, however. Here is one example user (of many), from May, with the non-saurik names changed: --- Day changed Tue May 29 2012 01:04:34 <xxx> this iCloud shit is getting ridiculous 01:04:59 <saurik> xxx: ? 01:05:16 <xxx> saurik: I upgraded my phone, but my iCloud backup was 7GB, i've spent the last two days straight trying to restore it 01:05:38 <xxx> (if the download is interrupted for one second, it fails, and there is no download resume or anything similar or way to download to iTunes or anything) 01:05:50 <xxx> and on my slow internet, 7GB takes about 13 hours to download 01:06:10 <saurik> ouch 01:06:20 <lmrpq> I backup everything minus the Camera Roll, so my backups stay small. If I update, I use iTunes for a one off backup/restore. 01:06:56 <xxx> yeah; i should have disabled the camera roll 01:07:33 <xxx> saurik: I don't think it fails if the screen doesn't turn off, so right now I'm sitting with it for the ~9 remaining hours on my 7th attempt tapping the screen. 01:07:35 <lmrpq> However, the backup I made before upgrading to 5.1.1 turned out to be corrupt (wtf?) so I had to restore from iCloud minus Camera Roll. 01:07:46 <xxx> lmrpq: how do you restore minus camera roll?? 01:07:50 <xxx> oh, iTunes backup 01:08:02 <xxx> i want to restore from iCloud without camera roll, for maybe ~500mb 01:08:08 <lmrpq> No, my iCloud backups don't have camera roll, so I had to do that 01:08:12 <xxx> hmm 01:08:15 <lmrpq> I was not happy. 01:08:19 <xxx> maybe i could finish setup 01:08:20 <xxx> jailbreak it 01:08:26 <xxx> remove the "setup finished" flag 01:08:32 <xxx> hook into the setup script 01:08:41 <xxx> skip parts of the download 01:08:45 <xxx> :< 01:09:25 <xxx> hmm maybe i could also go somewhere with > 10mbps internet 01:09:37 <lmrpq> Apple has a lot of money. I wish they put some of it into making stellar cloud services. 01:11:18 <saurik> xxx: what kind of device? 01:13:03 <saurik> ah, I'm going to resume 4S? (as you said iphone) 01:13:47 <xxx> yaeh 01:13:55 <saurik> I guess its time for the drinking bird --- Day changed Wed May 30 2012 00:07:33 <xxx> iCloud restore failed. 00:07:37 <xxx> :( 00:07:42 <xxx> time to start again! The best part of the entire report (which you will note was still plaguing this user a day later, as near the end the timestamps reset for May 30th): 00:42:52 <xxx> all i really want is my chrono trigger save game :(

dasil003 14y ago

Is this true though? It's easy for everyone for all the armchair CEOs to say that Jobs never would have released such an epic fail, but I'm not so sure. If there's one thing that Apple hates as much as a half-baked UX, it's dependency on another tech company. It seems pretty obvious to me as a casual developer and observer of Google maps over the years that global mapping is really really hard. How could Apple not have known this? I don't think even they have this much hubris. Now we don't know why negotiations with Google for the maps API failed. Maybe Apple was overconfident, maybe Google was playing hard ball for Android's sake, maybe a bit of both. But regardless of the reason, the contract was not renewed and they had to release something. The iPhone without maps is not the iPhone. The fact that they used an algorithmic approach to QA says more about the timelines than Apple's beliefs about the overall best approach. There was simply not time to get people on the ground to do a proper QA job. Apple's hands were tied.

cookiecaper 14y ago
Are Bing Maps this horrible? Couldn't they license those if they didn't have a choice? Or what about MapQuest? What about the maps used by GPS units? Couldn't they have made a deal with Garmin or Tomtom or someone like that? It may have taken more work than integration with Google, but it'd almost definitely take less work than starting from scratch. I definitely do not believe that their hands were tied and they were forced into creating their own shoddy, incomplete system. On top of all that, I think Google has more business intelligence than to actually let the contract for iOS maps go. Maybe both sides were just bluffing and never thought the one party would cut the other loose, or something like that, but you'd think with a deal this big at some point someone would come back with their tail between their legs and reopen negotiations. Of course, it's all speculation at this point anyway. It'd be nice if someone with knowledge could come in here and elucidate, though the likelihood of that is really small.
- skeletonjelly 14y ago
  I thought Apple did have a relationship with Tomtom for this?

epo 14y ago

Apple is smarter than this. They would not have released such a half-baked replacement unless they were forced to. I suspect Google refused to renew knowing Apple were working on a replacement but were not yet ready. This is Apple's "Vista" moment and will inevitably draw the "wouldn't have happened under Jobs" comments. How Apple recovers will form business school study material for years to come.

rahoulb 14y ago
I'm not so sure they were forced to. I thought that too, initially, but another commenter somewhere else pointed out how hasty and nervy Google's "maps" announcement was, just before WWDC. In that context, it doesn't sound like something Google was wanting to happen.
- randomdata 14y ago
  What we do know is that Google raised their general prices for map access since the original deal with Apple was made. If we assume Google also wanted to increase the rate for Apple's access, it seems logical that they would be upset that they lost a multimillion dollar deal.

batista 14y ago

>Crucial insight, there. From the perspective of an observer who has no special affection for Apple, it's surprising that a company of that competence would succumb to such a basic process error. What insight? Apple makes most of their stuff themselves -- or gets them from multiple sources. Maps were an exception, as a key technology that was in the hands of a competitor. But not because Apple could help it at the time: they made a foray into a new territory, mobile phones, and Google had all the available technology and was a non competitor at the time (the first Android phone was out a year later, Oct 2008). It's a few years that they have already started the process of moving to something of their own. They bought some mapping companies, etc. Something forced their hands to make the switch before that was over. In any case, you can't just jump over 8+ years of refinements that Google maps have (not to mention all the "driving endless miles for Google Street View and road info, etc).

sigzero 14y ago

I doubt that Apple was not aware of how good or bad their maps program was.