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Comment by wklauss | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid the obsession is not on Apple over Google but on the media and blogs over Apple and every single thing they do. Of course Apple will watch its competitor closely, especially since both are now headed in same direction. And of course they need competing services.

Likewise, I'm sure that Google is watching closely every move Apple makes. But nobody in their right mind would say Google has an "obsession" with Apple.

This map thing is a fun anecdote, but I'm not sure how big of a deal it really is. And yes, the maps are worse than the ones Google has develop for the past 7 years -it was to be expected- but Apple didn't have much room for movement here. If you cannot go forward on the current path, and standing still is not an option, the only possible move is take a step back and find a new route. Simple as that. Painful, sure, but it had to be done sooner or later.

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> If you cannot go forward on the current path, and standing still is not an option, the only possible move is take a step back and find a new route. Simple as that. Painful, sure, but it had to be done sooner or later.

Of course, they have good reasons to make their own mapping infrastructure. However, working on it does not mean they have to release it before it's ready (and it clearly isn't). They could have used the old Google maps app for iOS 6 (maybe with some surface tweaks), while continuing to work on getting their own maps into some sort of reasonable shape. Maybe they would have had to pay inflated fees to Google or something, but they certainly have the money to do that in the short-term. Of course the Google maps app has its own issues, but people are very used to it; continuing to use it on iOS 6, wouldn't have taken people by surprise or generated such an enormous amount of negative press for Apple.

The other possibility is that they didn't realize how poor a shape their maps were in. If that's the case, it's far more worrying, because it means they're in way over their heads, and suggests that the effort required to fix things is likely to be enormous.

Apple is usually closed mouthed, and tends to adopt a position of "trust us, really, we know what we're doing." Unfortunately that doesn't work so well in a case like this where they pretty clearly don't know what they're doing...

I don't want to end up being the one defending the quality of iOS maps. I've been using it since iOS6 beta 1. There's been a lot of progress and other than the fun mishaps we are reading now, they are functional.

Are they as good as Google? Not even close, especially when trying to search for something specific (I think the dataset is not the problem, the search engine is). But I also wouldn't say that the product is not on a reasonable shape. It's comparable in accuracy with other maps solutions out there.

And we seem to be forgetting that Google Maps come with errors and funny gaffes as well:

http://www.cio.com/article/686778/6_Memorable_Google_Maps_Mi...

They are just the standard, the bar we measure any other map service against. And thats good, because they are really fantastic, but I think it would be naive to expect Apple to launch something of that level of quality in the first attempt.

Google maps sucked when it first came out. It will be fixed and both applications will improve. I think this is will only turn out two awesome map applications rather than just relying on google for everything.

Really? I remember when I first used Google Maps coming from being a Map Quest user, I was blown away that I could scroll without having to refresh the page.

I remember something very similar - I wasn't even a Google fan then and I remember just not wanting to go back to Mapquest after having seen Google Maps.

Google's interface was revolutionary, but MapQuest had deeper and more accurate data for years.

Also, one search box that intelligently knew these are all the same: "Illinois, Chicago", "Chicago Illinois", and even "Chi ill".

It would suck if it launched today with someone else with a product like Google Maps is today. At the time, maps was fantastic.

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