So Forstall and his direct report were responsible for two botched product launches, Siri and Maps. This is a big blow to the camp suggesting firing Forstall was a mistake.
Apple Maps is remarkably good today, doing nearly all of the important things well. Here in Australia, it's on par with Google Maps for driving (slightly worse for novel route planning, slightly better for guidance) and when travelling to major world cities I've found Apple Maps is frequently better than Google Maps for navigating on foot and public transport.
Google Maps now provides wholly personalized points of interest and attention affordances in its UI. It's also well on its way to 3D scanning and annotating POIs in every structure in the world, including very large pedestrian-only interiors. It also has realtime transit and traffic feeds, and more pedestrian trails and venue detail than anyone else. All of these are areas where its competition is not just behind, but falling further behind. But the personalization combined with superior POI search really illustrates how Google's competitors don't even have the platform to properly conceptualize the type of product Google is building, much less build it.
TomTom just don't have this issue, I've been using it for 5 years now and it's never done anything like that. Also TomTom Traffic is vastly better than Google Traffic, consistently beating it for time and route prediction(I've been driving with Android Auto and TomTom 5000 set up side by side for a while, and if TomTom suggests a detour it's usually a good one - take the one google suggests and you're getting stuck on some small street that google thinks you can drive through but you actually can't).
Also anecdotally I’m not sure if I can agree that Google’s POIs are vastly better, mostly just different but of a similar low quality (which is to say neither pleases me).
Both maps have similarly good cartography where it matters. In most countries, both maps are similarly accurate.
I find it interesting that Google doesn't care enough to add the most recent several metro lines in (for example) Beijing or Shanghai, considering that many people try to use Google Maps in China when visiting and usually seem to end up switching to Apple Maps as a result of the complete trash the Google Maps experience is there. I wonder if they switch back when they go home.
It's good enough that I use it primarily on my phone over Google Maps, in the UK
When you set hard deadlines for software release dates because you want to have tentpole features for IOS releases, and you mostly refuse to do widespread beta tests because then it won't be surprising, you're creating the maps debacle. Now I'm sure maps was harder than it looked, but I'd also bet lots of people on the inside knew that. They should have let the date slip.
They couldn't let the date slip, because the deal with Google was set to expire and not having a built-in maps application at all was not an option.
The question you need to ask is, did a pushy management style make Apple Maps better than it would have been otherwise or worse. I think it's hard to argue that pushing the team hard didn't produce a better product than they would have had otherwise.
We are hitting territory where there are now problems so hard that it will now take time to create the software. He never got that.