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Comment by blrgeek | Hacker News Reader

The article has no mention of why this is a 400 year advantage - or how long it will take for Apple to get over this.

He lays out very well that a human element is required to bring these streams of data together. And Apple is not a company with the DNA of big data.

Just algorithmic manipulation of the data is not possible or sufficient - they will need an army to integrate these streams and bring them up to par. And Apple is even less happy to deal with an Army than Google was.

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Maybe the 400 years referes to the number of people-years used to manually clean up map information?

Thats how I read it.

Although frankly speaking, if anything 400 man-years seems very low for worldwide mapping.

Don't underestimate the value of legwork and algorithms.

edit: I... I skimmed the article the first time, but... The author actually claims that it's a data quality problem, not an algorithm problem. Huh?!

second edit: I guess my only real contention is that "data quality" is a fake idea.

So it's a problem that $4 billion could solve in a few days, right?

If you can get 14600 workers who can do this work and the software, you could do it in 10 days.

I thought it was reasonably entertaining to consider 400 salary years at $100k each just to see what the numbers looked like.

Apple has had trouble with Big Data, in the parlance, but iCloud is still running. They've made some pretty dumb mistakes with their online services over the years, but they still do happen to be syncing data (if even just push notifications) to something on the order of a hundred million devices.

Catching up to where Google Maps is today will take somewhere between 10 days and 400 years. I'll bet good money that they have this nailed within a 95% tolerance before next year's new hardware model.

From what I've heard, Google had an army of around 1000+ contract workers in Hyderabad, India, cleaning up the data for about 5 years. If anything 400 man-years sounds low :)

This is apart from MapMaker, and their dev teams, and their software improvements.

For instance, if you look at directions in India now, they're awesome, since they tell you landmarks to look for on the way [pass by * on left], at the intersections, etc. http://goo.gl/maps/b8w15 for instance.

My guess is 95% will take 3-4 years - once they accept they have a problem.

I don't think 3-4 years is a crazy estimate. This is pretty cutting edge stuff. If you hadn't already seen it, the Atlantic piece on the technology is a fantastic read: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...

On the other hand, this actually is one of the rarer problems where throwing 10,000 contract workers from India for 5 months could solve much of the problem, especially since Google has already paved the way on the harder parts.

What I really want to see is a serious quality comparison between Apple and OSM.

edit: And the million dollar question... How much of Google's map data was correlated/verified against iPhone positioning data?

Does the position data provide any information beyond "phone was within a meter or two"?

I can see how that would help reveal issues, but I don't see how it would help much in fixing them.

9 women won't give birth in a month.

Ten developers each giving their boss a copy of Mythical Man Month won't make him read it any faster either.

Ha ha! One of the better variations on this oft misquoted old saying I have read.

No but then you'll have nine babies in nine months.

Gestation time is not a "parallelizable" problem.

Fixing map data is.

I believe the 400 years is referring to Apple failing on basic principles of map making which have been around for a long time. Possibly a reference to "Nova totius Terrarum Orbis", a famous atlas from 1630?

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