I can't imagine that the decision to drop Google early was made by the executive committee without getting a sign-off from Forstall that they would be ready wit

I can't imagine that the decision to drop Google early was made by the executive committee without getting a sign-off from Forstall that they would be ready with a new Maps app. The ordering in making that fateful Google decision must have been first to decide if their own alternative was going to be close to ready. At that point somebody aggregated the data from the Maps team and made a forecast that said they would be. Further, the failure of Maps has made iOS 6 itself a failure. You can tell from the marketing materials that the new Maps application was the headline feature of iOS 6. You can reverse engineer their thinking - we are dropping Google so this new release of the OS needs something special to hold it up. That 'something special' was the 3D view. People are forgetting that Maps was marketed as a better application than Google Maps. So that leaves a few points where it went wrong: a) whoever provided the input to the group that decided to drop Google in saying that they would be ready b) whoever decided to drop Google based on that info c) whoever was responsible for delivering the finished Maps product d) whoever was responsible for pinning the success of iOS 6 on Maps e) whoever was responsible for testing Maps f) whoever was responsible for raising user expectation by marketing Maps and iOS 6 as being 'better' and 'the best' As head of iOS and a member of the exec committee, a lot of those paths lead back to Forstall.