"The Maps application is used by millions of customers and it's the best mapping program on any mobile platform."
Pretty bold to say "the best mapping program on any mobile platform".
Pretty bold to say "the best mapping program on any mobile platform".
Lets do some basic math. Lets say you pay a driver $10/hr to drive 8 hrs a day at an average speed of 35mph in the city. That is about 250 miles covered per driver, per day and $80. So you do that for 10 days and that is 2,500 miles for $800.
Now you build 10,000 cars with street view like capabilities, call it $40,000 per car, perhaps you get a car maker to help you perhaps not. that is 400M$ for cars, and 10,000 drivers is $8M for 10 days and 250 million miles. You haven't even spent close to a billion dollars and you've got street view like imagery for every major city on the planet in 10 days. Run this program for a year and you cover every road twice with your 10,000 drivers.
Its certainly doable by Apple if they choose to go that route.
Also, driving is the cheap part - structuring all the gathered data and images is a nontrivial task, you simply can't do it in a few months (as apple would need) if you don't have the know-how and software tools for this.
Apple has the money to do it no question. However it takes more than just money. On the data collection side there's designing, building and integrating the sensor system on the car. That has to be tested. Then it needs to be replicated many times. The data collected needs to be stored somewhere. Either locally on the car or in the cloud. Either way that has to be figured out. You need to hire drivers, protect yourself from liability etc. While all of the these pieces are doable they're non-trivial. Especially when you consider the number of people involved. And that's just collecting the data.
Now Apple has to process the data and make that available to the maps app. And there needs to be software written for the maps mobile apps. Perhaps desktop too. All that needs to be tested. This "presentation" side of the problem involves a bunch of people too.
So how long do you think it takes a company the size of Apple to accomplish all that? I'd set a lower bound of one year. So for 12 months Google maps still has street view over Apple and will probably improve it (especially if they know Apple is creating a competing product).
While money isn't an issue the amount of time, energy and other resources required to make a product as refined as Google street view is enormous. Can Apple do it? It probably comes down to leadership. Steve probably could have done it. I wonder if the current leadership can.
It took Google years to get Street View right, with massive amount of engineering talent and financial capital committed along the way.
12 months would be extremely challenging even for Apple. As for 10 days... well let's just say I'd be a bit unhappy, if ChuckMcM was my program manager :p
That said, if you had been unemployed for over a year and I said, I've got a really simple job for you that will last at least a year, you drive this car up and down every street in the town at the legal limit. I'll pay you $400/week with benefits. Probably pretty appealing to you.
Don't forget fuel charges! ~$40 per day (at 3 USD per gallon for a car that gives 20 miles per gallon).
Google have spent many years perfecting the collection & analysis of the data, Maps needs fixing yesterday.
1) "an average speed of 35mph in the city" is not going to happen. In Manhattan that's 15 MPH. In midtown Manhattan it's 1.7 MPH. So 10 MPH on average would be more realistic.
2) You forgot gas
3) You forgot tickets
4) You forgot car insurance
5) You forgot car maintenance
6) You forgot car accidents and the cost of replacement
7) You forgot tolls
8) You forgot lawsuit costs
9) You forgot parking costs (and time to drive from and to parking)
10) You forgot the costs of the hiring process (try hiring 10 drivers in 10 days)
11) You forgot the cost of routing of all these cars (you have to organize 10,000 cars somehow)
12) Your guess of $40,000/car for design, approval, production of a specialized car is way off.
13) You forgot server costs (stitching the images)
14) You forgot storage costs (storing, transferring) millions of photos.
15) You forgot IT and management costs to support all this shit. $8M will buy you a few executives in charge of this project.
16) Your estimate of $10/hr for the driver salary is way off (assuming it's just a driver, and not a trained technician). Average salary of a cab drive in NYC is $25/hr. Chicago - $17/hr. Los Angeles - $17.5/hr. That's not counting the benefits - health insurance, social security, etc.
We can make the numbers more accurate. Hell if Tim Cook hired me and gave me the budget for it we could knock this out in a couple of years. I'm sure there are at least half a dozen folks out there who could. The simple point remains though which is that you can solve this problem with money, and you can make the solution time arbitrarily short by scaling the money.