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Oh good gravy. While it's wonderful that an apology of sorts was offered, that's not unusual in Apple's history. They blew this, they blew this, they blew this
by jpxxx 14y ago
Oh good gravy. While it's wonderful that an apology of sorts was offered, that's not unusual in Apple's history.
They blew this, they blew this, they blew this. They failed to reset customer expectations, walked directly into a woodchipper with a serious platform regression, and gave their competitors a talking point that will actually stick for the next few years.
The only interesting bit of Apple Kremlinology that can be engaged in here: did they intentionally portray the maps as an advance in an attempt to keep iphone 5 pre-orders up? Because there is no way Apple had convinced themselves this was launch worthy internally. They cannot have become that self-unaware already.
I imagine this apology was written months ago.
- zevyoura 14y agoActually, since the maps coverage is pretty good in California, I wouldn't be that surprised if they didn't realize just how far behind Google their POI data was internationally. Also, even if they did realize this, I don't think they would gone forward so eagerly if they realized how intense the backlash was going to be.
- jpxxx 14y agoI don't know... it is interesting that they have a vastly superior Maps system in China now, and a relatively high quality set for the West Coast. (edit: areas of extreme competitive importance) But I can't believe that they would go toe-for-toe on the map client feature set without similar attention being paid to overall database quality. They've licensed dozens of data sources, they've bought entire companies, they've been working on this for years... I think they pulled the trigger for a variety of reasons and then braced for impact. This change wasn't taken lightly.
- jimbokun 14y ago"...it is interesting that they have a vastly superior Maps system in China now, and a relatively high quality set for the West Coast." And this is exactly what Jobs would have led with. He would have pointed out any and all areas where Apple's Maps performed better than Google, before segueing into how they are addressing the remaining problems. I bet he would have some clever statistics on just how often Apple's maps are right. And he would have tons of examples of mistakes on Google's maps, to create some doubt about whether Apple was really worse (remember all of the other phones that Jobs tried to use to demonstrate that iPhone wasn't the only phone suffering from "death-grip" issues during antenna-gate?). I sure miss him.
- Evbn 14y agoI for one appreciate Tim Cook's straightforward honesty (a total operations guy who knows you can't bluff physics) to Jobs's bluster (salesman/style maven)
- gurkendoktor 14y ago> did they intentionally portray the maps as an advance in an attempt to keep iphone 5 pre-orders up? Given that Maps is the major change in iOS6, wouldn't it have been better to release the iPhone 5 on a slightly improved "iOS 5.2", and to keep iOS6 for the next iPad? Though that would have worked against Passbook :(
- Evbn 14y agoAnd they could fix the confusing off by one naming mismatch between iphone and ios at the same time.