Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

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"Someone had to know that Maps was a bad idea. A huge step backwards. They had to know. So the question might very well be: Why did they do it?"

A theory:

Maybe they did it because Apple has an unhealthy, top-down corporate culture that doesn't encourage dissent or whistle-blowing? Nobody said stop because it isn't the Apple way?

To me (not an Apple user or Apple employee) their corporate culture, their values, are defined by secrecy, leader-worship, and a particular kind arrogance. Not necessarily at the level of individual employees, but throughout the organisation as a whole. In such environments, especially when the company is highly successful and seems to be able to do no wrong, it becomes difficult for individuals and even groups to say stop. And even bad ideas and technologies gain momentum.

Apple is a great company, make great products, and deserve their success. I just hope that Tim Cook is trying to get rid of the leader worship that surrounded Steve Jobs.

Too much judgment.

You're assuming Apple had other choice other than make a Maps.app from the ground up. I don't think it's the case. All the apps that used Google's data (YouTube, Maps) just stopped getting updates after Android. It's obvious their contract with Google ended and they had to ship something. I'm sure everybody acknowledged the solution was subpar, just saying "it sucks, don't ship it" isn't a solution.

Perhaps I am being too judgmental. I have know special knowledge of Apple's corporate culture. I'm just saying how it seems to me.

I agree that Apple had to cut loose from Google and develop their own mapping. And they needed new features for the iPhone 6 launch, which gave them a hard schedule limit.

Maybe "everybody" did decide that the mapping sucked but they had to ship it. That seems rather un-Apple to me: they are obsessive about user experience and have cut features in the past when the tech didn't work. So I'm not convinced by that argument.

(Edit: added second para)

If they felt they were forced by circumstances to ship the maps application now -- which there's at least some evidence of, if John Gruber's information about the way the Apple/Google contracts were timed is true -- then they'd kind of be in a Catch-22. What features could they have actually cut from the Maps app? The mistakes in 3D meshes and fuzzy terrain tiles make for the biggest point-and-laugh screen caps, and perhaps they could have cut that, but that would have caused just as much screaming. And the biggest issues really seem to be with the POI database, which you can't launch without. (And which, it should be noted, isn't something that Apple built on their own; at least in part, what Apple Maps is revealing is how bad a lot of other third-party geographic databases are compared to Google's.)

As for Apple's culture, well. I don't have special knowledge of it but I live in Silicon Valley and know a few people who've worked there or continue to work there, and your description about it doesn't seem to me to be accurate. There was a great deal of respect for Steve Jobs but there was no perception that he was always right. People did in fact push back against him, and he'd often listen. (And in cases where he didn't, there's still some controversy going on.) I think you're correct to surmise that there's a lot of arrogance in Apple's culture, mind you -- but I can assure you that Google's matches Apple's ego for ego. If anything, Google's corporate culture is more smug than Apple's, not less.

The app works fine. The user experience is better than the previous with the new features (navigation, voice). It's not a tech problem.

The whole problem revolves around business strategy. Mapping data. Google monopolizes this area, and the other providers are all tied to Apple's competitors (Microsoft, Nokia).

So either they come up with their own, or stay on the hands of competitors (since mapping is such a core feature).

I wish they adopt Open Street Maps, or contribute back to it. Mapping is one area where all good solutions are proprietary and in the hand of a few, it completely sucks.

Apple uses Open Street Map. See here:

http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2012/03/08/welcome-apple/

Adopting/Contributing to the project as their number one mapping foundation would be nice and would have provided them tons of goodwill. But I guess Apple also wants to use OSM together with data from other commercial sources (tomtom).

That applies to the strange, pre–iOS 6 iPhoto-specific map tiles. OSM is acknowledged in the new app's acknowledgements, but so far there are places where the Maps.app is less detailed than the basic OSM database – but no doubt this can and will get better.

At the same time, Google has a much more transparent culture and it still ended up with the Nexus Q, which was swiftly put on hold just a few weeks after it was announced.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/31/3207482/nexus-q-consumer-l...

The difference being that the nexus Q was a whole new product with absolutely no expectations set for it, not an existing products with millions of users. The Q was obviously a failed experiment, but experimentation in that way is healthy. obviously not every product is going to be a success, but when you're trying crazy new things with a high probility of failure, it's best not to do it on your flagship product and with no escape strategy.

The Nexus Q wikipedia page [1] says that its launch was postponed due to "feedback from users that the device had too few features for its price", not due to quality defects. It seems to me that Google made an honest effort to develop a product, and decided not to ship it for equally good reasons.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_Q

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