5 ms·

Ads in Maps and how that contrasts with the customer experience is the message here. I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" a

by duxup 1y ago

Ads in Maps and how that contrasts with the customer experience is the message here. I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ... Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree with.

kelnos 1y ago
> I think Steve would have changed with the times too That's the thing that annoys me whenever someone says "what would $DECEASED_PERSON do?" We can't know! Maybe we can make an accurate guess about what Steve Jobs would have done in 2011, but it's really hard to say what he would have done in 2025, had he lived. Not just because people change over time (he was 56 when he died, and would be 70 today), but because business requirements and practices change over time, and executives -- even Jobs -- adapt to those changes. Maybe this is exactly what Jobs would have done: resist adding advertising for years and years, but finally in 2025 decide it's necessary for the business in some cases. (But I also agree that this sort of thing is garbage for the user experience. In my fantasy world, advertising doesn't exist, at all.)
- wrs 1y ago
  Of course we don’t know. But regarding this specific example, bear in mind that Apple is in vastly better shape as a business than it was in 1999. So if that argument didn’t work on him then, it doesn’t seem implausible that it wouldn’t work now.
  - pqtyw 1y ago
    Or the opposite. The Apple might and/or its execs might think that they are in such a dominant position that purposefully lowering UX to extract a few extra pennies from their users won't cause any short term harm. While back in the 90s the brand/reputational damage might have destroyed them.
    - tadfisher 1y ago
      Back in the 90s, Apple had zero brand or reputation. It had a few die-hard Mac fans and a bunch of inherited deals with public school district purchasing departments from when the Apple II dominated. They licensed Mac OS to clone manufacturers like Microsoft did with Windows. They were essentially already destroyed and waiting for the eviction notice. Jobs, with Mac OS X and the iMac, absolutely created the unassailable perception of quality and user experience Apple is known for today. The term "reality distortion field" was used a lot in relation to how much Jobs sold Apple and the Mac in keynotes. So it's completely fair to use his well-known positions against the company's current practices.
      - pqtyw 1y ago
        Yes, exactly. They couldn't afford to crapify their products for short term again and hope to survive. They wouldn't be here if they did that. Now they can. > well-known positions against the company's current practices Companies generally don't really have values besides maximizing profits. People working or leading them might. But that almost never lasts more than a few decades at most.
- xp84 1y ago
  > decide it's necessary for the business Necessary? That implies that there is some real threat to the business that needs to be countered this way -- which is laughable. Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares. Steve had twice the principles as Cook (on issues he cared about at least), so I don't think he'd allow "the investors want even greater growth" to force him do something he found gross and degrading to the experience.
  - kelnos 1y ago
    > Necessary? Necessary, beneficial, has more upside than downside, whatever way you want to slice it. > Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares I feel like this is actually support for my argument that people change over time (either naturally, or to adapt to the times themselves changing): I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today.
    - xp84 1y ago
      > I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today. Agree, but personally I don't respect Cook and agree he seems to have sold his spine sometime around when he sold his soul. I got the sense that Jobs wasn't drifting toward increased greed but rather, a knowledge that he and Apple both had more than enough "F-you money" -- to do what they thought was best for the product, knowing that that was also exactly aligned with the long-term interests of the company anyway.
Noumenon72 1y ago
There are lots of good experiences from ads in maps: - I search for "restaurants" and someone is having a special - A trampoline park opens near me, I'd like it to catch my eye - I've been googling chocolates recently, so populate the map with chocolate shops - Maybe I'm bored as a car passenger and watching the map screen so my attention is free anyway
- kelnos 1y ago
  That sounds absolutely awful, honestly. I wouldn't want to see any of those things mess with the "natural" order of search results for whatever I've explicitly searched for.
- joshgachnang 1y ago
  The 1st and 3rd are better served by Apple choosing the best result rather than who's paid for an ad.
  - xp84 1y ago
    I do agree with you in theory, though their 'attempts' at this kind of thing are comical if not absurd (witness the organic search results in the App Store).
- ses1984 1y ago
  I don’t want my phone to consume any of my “free” attention, ever, but holy cow especially not while driving.
  - jdminhbg 1y ago
    > as a car passenger
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      Sometimes the driver looks at the map screen too. That's most of the reason it's there.
AlexandrB 1y ago
Ads in the App Store continue to be a bad customer experience as well.
- waylandsmithers 1y ago
  Anything you search for, the first thing at the top of the list is an ad from a competitor!
ndepoel 1y ago
Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot topics we'd be discussing today, they would be very different from the ones we are discussing now.
- xp84 1y ago
  Sad but probably true. I hadn't really considered that aspect. Anyone so influential no doubt changed the whole Zeitgeist, not just their own company's course.
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  Correct. This is something that is becoming increasingly apparent with time.
- apples_oranges 1y ago
  He seemed very content in the end that Apple is on the right track and set up correctly for the future. I don't think he was talking about profit margins, but rather about the soul of the company, if there is such a thing.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  I think he would have been all over AI, and would have pushed Siri ahead instead of letting the product stagnate. I suspect he'd have pushed into robotics as well, especially home automation robots. Home automation in general, in fact. His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't. Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software division. The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more and more of this from Apple until there's a change of leadership. (If we're lucky...)
  - rhetocj23 1y ago
m463 1y ago
> "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" ... shrill I think these are fans of apple who have lost something. Personally I think steve jobs was a good integrator - he got people together. Sometimes the people were apple <-> customers, sometimes music industry <-> computers, etc If there was controversy, he stepped in and lead - and stepped into the spotlight and explained. I don't see the same sort of leadership nowadays. Controversies like the app store woes, pricing, monopoly behavior, bad service to developers, even tariff stuff. Also he was good at creating/choosing new next products and killing not-quite-there products. yeah, but that ship has sailed.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  I think what Steve added to Apple more than anything was being the biggest asshole in the room who was willing to point at a fellow high-up person and tell them their idea sucked ass, and you may be surprised to read what comes next, I think that's critical to a good product line. There are numerous problems caused by having too many stakeholders, too many cooks in the kitchen if you will, steering your given ship, and sometimes exactly what you need is one guy who knows damn well what needs to be made, and isn't afraid to tell you to take a hike if you want to die on the hill in question. That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too: the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more. The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something to be said for being able to navigate those difficult conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a way where they don't want to quit outright. And those failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just had no fucking ability to People at all. So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his out.
teaearlgraycold 1y ago
The ads in Google Maps are fairly tame by modern standards. Of course, Apple can afford to not make this change and I hope they abstain. But it’s really not too offensive in my opinion.
- qwerpy 1y ago
  > fairly tame by modern standards That means they’re still early in the ad-ification of the product. After a few dozen “what if we increase the ad density” A/B tests later, we’ll get to the point Google search is now. Except with maps you’re stuck using the app without an ad blocker.
wat10000 1y ago
I usually don't like those articles, but I think this one has a pretty good point. If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you. We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve specifically told his successors not to ask "what would Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or customer appeal or whatever. This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the customer experience angle, and there's little room for disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a better customer experience, you might argue it would have been better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience. Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to make more money" is a message I can get behind.
furyofantares 1y ago
Ads is a red line for me too. They're in the App Store and I hate it. Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.
microtherion 1y ago
Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience. But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.
- gretch 1y ago
  Or how the iphone 4 antenna was obstructed by normal holding of the phone (including poses in apple marketing materials), and then steve just told everyone they were holding their phones wrong.
  - Y-bar 1y ago
    Yeah. The phone was faulty from a hardware design standpoint, and the manner Steve Jobs handled it was bad. But he was correct on one point: Every other manufacturer at the time had a paragraph and illustration in their manual telling people not to hold their phone in a certain manner. I think much of his bad attitude came from this fact that he felt Apple was unfailingly singled out.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  >Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience. If I search for a nearby cafe on Apple Maps it pulls in data from Trip Advisor. I suspect you could provide a better experience than that even with ads (although I doubt they will).
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    Ads are a good way to be spammed with low-quality options that choose to pay apple.
TZubiri 1y ago
>I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ... Ok, but it's true, the man died, the company is public, and like all companies they will eventually profit off the brand by making a shitty product. It's all rug pulls, try a Hershey's chocolate bar, mine had soy in it.
bowsamic 1y ago
I agree I’m also tired of it. It’s all so hypothetical, trying to guess what a dead man would think. Who cares anyway? He made loads of bad decisions
lowbloodsugar 1y ago
Google maps is better, except for the ads. If Apple Maps gets ads, I’ll just switch to Google. So weird that Apple wouldn’t comprehend that privacy (which requires no ads) is their moat.

by duxup 1y ago

kelnos 1y ago

> I think Steve would have changed with the times too That's the thing that annoys me whenever someone says "what would $DECEASED_PERSON do?" We can't know! Maybe we can make an accurate guess about what Steve Jobs would have done in 2011, but it's really hard to say what he would have done in 2025, had he lived. Not just because people change over time (he was 56 when he died, and would be 70 today), but because business requirements and practices change over time, and executives -- even Jobs -- adapt to those changes. Maybe this is exactly what Jobs would have done: resist adding advertising for years and years, but finally in 2025 decide it's necessary for the business in some cases. (But I also agree that this sort of thing is garbage for the user experience. In my fantasy world, advertising doesn't exist, at all.)

wrs 1y ago
Of course we don’t know. But regarding this specific example, bear in mind that Apple is in vastly better shape as a business than it was in 1999. So if that argument didn’t work on him then, it doesn’t seem implausible that it wouldn’t work now.
- pqtyw 1y ago
  Or the opposite. The Apple might and/or its execs might think that they are in such a dominant position that purposefully lowering UX to extract a few extra pennies from their users won't cause any short term harm. While back in the 90s the brand/reputational damage might have destroyed them.
  - tadfisher 1y ago
    Back in the 90s, Apple had zero brand or reputation. It had a few die-hard Mac fans and a bunch of inherited deals with public school district purchasing departments from when the Apple II dominated. They licensed Mac OS to clone manufacturers like Microsoft did with Windows. They were essentially already destroyed and waiting for the eviction notice. Jobs, with Mac OS X and the iMac, absolutely created the unassailable perception of quality and user experience Apple is known for today. The term "reality distortion field" was used a lot in relation to how much Jobs sold Apple and the Mac in keynotes. So it's completely fair to use his well-known positions against the company's current practices.
    - pqtyw 1y ago
      Yes, exactly. They couldn't afford to crapify their products for short term again and hope to survive. They wouldn't be here if they did that. Now they can. > well-known positions against the company's current practices Companies generally don't really have values besides maximizing profits. People working or leading them might. But that almost never lasts more than a few decades at most.
xp84 1y ago
> decide it's necessary for the business Necessary? That implies that there is some real threat to the business that needs to be countered this way -- which is laughable. Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares. Steve had twice the principles as Cook (on issues he cared about at least), so I don't think he'd allow "the investors want even greater growth" to force him do something he found gross and degrading to the experience.
- kelnos 1y ago
  > Necessary? Necessary, beneficial, has more upside than downside, whatever way you want to slice it. > Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares I feel like this is actually support for my argument that people change over time (either naturally, or to adapt to the times themselves changing): I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today.
  - xp84 1y ago
    > I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today. Agree, but personally I don't respect Cook and agree he seems to have sold his spine sometime around when he sold his soul. I got the sense that Jobs wasn't drifting toward increased greed but rather, a knowledge that he and Apple both had more than enough "F-you money" -- to do what they thought was best for the product, knowing that that was also exactly aligned with the long-term interests of the company anyway.

Noumenon72 1y ago

There are lots of good experiences from ads in maps: - I search for "restaurants" and someone is having a special - A trampoline park opens near me, I'd like it to catch my eye - I've been googling chocolates recently, so populate the map with chocolate shops - Maybe I'm bored as a car passenger and watching the map screen so my attention is free anyway

kelnos 1y ago
That sounds absolutely awful, honestly. I wouldn't want to see any of those things mess with the "natural" order of search results for whatever I've explicitly searched for.
joshgachnang 1y ago
The 1st and 3rd are better served by Apple choosing the best result rather than who's paid for an ad.
- xp84 1y ago
  I do agree with you in theory, though their 'attempts' at this kind of thing are comical if not absurd (witness the organic search results in the App Store).
ses1984 1y ago
I don’t want my phone to consume any of my “free” attention, ever, but holy cow especially not while driving.
- jdminhbg 1y ago
  > as a car passenger
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    Sometimes the driver looks at the map screen too. That's most of the reason it's there.

AlexandrB 1y ago

Ads in the App Store continue to be a bad customer experience as well.

waylandsmithers 1y ago
Anything you search for, the first thing at the top of the list is an ad from a competitor!

ndepoel 1y ago

Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot topics we'd be discussing today, they would be very different from the ones we are discussing now.

xp84 1y ago
Sad but probably true. I hadn't really considered that aspect. Anyone so influential no doubt changed the whole Zeitgeist, not just their own company's course.
rhetocj23 1y ago
Correct. This is something that is becoming increasingly apparent with time.
apples_oranges 1y ago
He seemed very content in the end that Apple is on the right track and set up correctly for the future. I don't think he was talking about profit margins, but rather about the soul of the company, if there is such a thing.
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
I think he would have been all over AI, and would have pushed Siri ahead instead of letting the product stagnate. I suspect he'd have pushed into robotics as well, especially home automation robots. Home automation in general, in fact. His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't. Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software division. The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more and more of this from Apple until there's a change of leadership. (If we're lucky...)
- rhetocj23 1y ago

m463 1y ago

> "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" ... shrill I think these are fans of apple who have lost something. Personally I think steve jobs was a good integrator - he got people together. Sometimes the people were apple <-> customers, sometimes music industry <-> computers, etc If there was controversy, he stepped in and lead - and stepped into the spotlight and explained. I don't see the same sort of leadership nowadays. Controversies like the app store woes, pricing, monopoly behavior, bad service to developers, even tariff stuff. Also he was good at creating/choosing new next products and killing not-quite-there products. yeah, but that ship has sailed.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
I think what Steve added to Apple more than anything was being the biggest asshole in the room who was willing to point at a fellow high-up person and tell them their idea sucked ass, and you may be surprised to read what comes next, I think that's critical to a good product line. There are numerous problems caused by having too many stakeholders, too many cooks in the kitchen if you will, steering your given ship, and sometimes exactly what you need is one guy who knows damn well what needs to be made, and isn't afraid to tell you to take a hike if you want to die on the hill in question. That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too: the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more. The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something to be said for being able to navigate those difficult conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a way where they don't want to quit outright. And those failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just had no fucking ability to People at all. So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his out.

teaearlgraycold 1y ago

The ads in Google Maps are fairly tame by modern standards. Of course, Apple can afford to not make this change and I hope they abstain. But it’s really not too offensive in my opinion.

qwerpy 1y ago
> fairly tame by modern standards That means they’re still early in the ad-ification of the product. After a few dozen “what if we increase the ad density” A/B tests later, we’ll get to the point Google search is now. Except with maps you’re stuck using the app without an ad blocker.

wat10000 1y ago

I usually don't like those articles, but I think this one has a pretty good point. If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you. We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve specifically told his successors not to ask "what would Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or customer appeal or whatever. This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the customer experience angle, and there's little room for disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a better customer experience, you might argue it would have been better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience. Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to make more money" is a message I can get behind.

furyofantares 1y ago

Ads is a red line for me too. They're in the App Store and I hate it. Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.

microtherion 1y ago

Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience. But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.

gretch 1y ago
Or how the iphone 4 antenna was obstructed by normal holding of the phone (including poses in apple marketing materials), and then steve just told everyone they were holding their phones wrong.
- Y-bar 1y ago
  Yeah. The phone was faulty from a hardware design standpoint, and the manner Steve Jobs handled it was bad. But he was correct on one point: Every other manufacturer at the time had a paragraph and illustration in their manual telling people not to hold their phone in a certain manner. I think much of his bad attitude came from this fact that he felt Apple was unfailingly singled out.
tonyedgecombe 1y ago
>Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience. If I search for a nearby cafe on Apple Maps it pulls in data from Trip Advisor. I suspect you could provide a better experience than that even with ads (although I doubt they will).
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  Ads are a good way to be spammed with low-quality options that choose to pay apple.

TZubiri 1y ago

>I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ... Ok, but it's true, the man died, the company is public, and like all companies they will eventually profit off the brand by making a shitty product. It's all rug pulls, try a Hershey's chocolate bar, mine had soy in it.

bowsamic 1y ago

I agree I’m also tired of it. It’s all so hypothetical, trying to guess what a dead man would think. Who cares anyway? He made loads of bad decisions

lowbloodsugar 1y ago

Google maps is better, except for the ads. If Apple Maps gets ads, I’ll just switch to Google. So weird that Apple wouldn’t comprehend that privacy (which requires no ads) is their moat.