The letter he should have written is exactly the letter he did write. Apple is not a bulleted-list kind of company, nor are they a reveal-implementation-details kind of company. No one knows, nor do they need to know, where inside the organization (and under whom) the Maps team lives.

The important message, "we know about it and we're going to fix it", is all that needed to come across.

"Apple is not a bullet list company."

You do realize that I copied Steve's MobileMe letter... and replaced MobileMe with Maps? I think Steve knows what kind of company Apple is and he used bullets.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2008/08/steve-jobs-on-mobileme-...

As other commenters have pointed out, the MobileMe letter was internal. Apple is not an outwardly bulleted-list kind of company.

So your ok with them taking away a better product for a crappy one simply because they know about it and are trying to fix it? Both of those points have been obvious to Apple for at least 6 months, when the beta came out.

Nobody said that, what he's saying is that the letter issued today is not substantially different from this blog post's idea of the letter.

Everyone knows the maps suck, the question is one of how one should conduct the damage control.

I personally don't see a problem with Tim Cook's PR message. It was short, on point, and didn't deflect much.

But that won't stop from the peanut gallery from taking cheap shots. Because when it comes to product launches, we're all suddenly PR experts.

> Both of those points have been obvious to Apple for at least 6 months

I'm getting tired of this argument. Where was everyone when this was so completely obvious 6 months ago? The beta was released, people were using it, and I can't find any criticisms outside of "It's not perfect, but it's working great and looks fantastic". Where are the bug reports? Sure, it was an NDA product, but that didn't stop bloggers from publishing stories about it:

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/08/09/3d-map-wars-apple-vs...

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/why-apples-map-look...

http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/11/goodbye-to-google-maps-with...

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/06/ios-6-maps-app-challe...

http://gizmodo.com/5918176/google-maps-vs-apple-maps-a-side-...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57450354-37/apples-new-3d-...

http://www.cultofmac.com/183742/apples-3d-maps-in-ios-6-are-...

http://mashable.com/2012/06/11/apple-vs-google-maps/

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/06/...

http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-06-12-apple-maps-alre...

"Obvious to Apple"

Apple != public. Plus it was a beta, ppl are not going to go crazy complaining about a beta product because they expected it to be fixed. That is something only Apple would know.

>Plus it was a beta, ppl are not going to go crazy complaining about a beta product because they expected it to be fixed.

That's not how it works. People complain about beta software all the time.

Case in point, Siri, after it's introduction.

I'm ok with them taking away a better hamstrung licensed product for a crappy one that will only get better simply because it probably had to happen at some point.

Yes it's been obvious to Apple (and developers like myself since PR1), but the apology is not for making the decision, the apology is for not being honest with its customers about its current quality.

Ok, ill go with that. My issue is with how its presented, like it was some revelation. Granted there is probably a method to there madness, it seems to me like they are shooting themself in the foot with raising themself so high when they know they are going to fall(specifically to maps).

>So your ok with them taking away a better product for a crappy one simply because they know about it and are trying to fix it?

No, he is not OK. He is just able to understand the business reasons behind it and knows that this is not a user-complain forum.

"They made the Maps worse" is neither interesting, nor new. For one, everyone can see that. It's more important to see why they did it, if they could avoid it, and how they should fix it, than to complain about it.

'We tried to coerce you into helping us turn our half-baked product into a real competitor. We failed.'

I took significant pleasure in downvoting your troll and even more at having a karmic position sufficient to openly gloat about it.

Admittedly, it may have been a bit trollish. But I also think it may well have been a serious perspective on Apple's part. "Because we can" seems to be a significant factor in their actions that has been increasingly publicly noted. To some extent (and I've been around Apple products since the '80's), it always has been an apparent aspect of Apple's approach and perspective.

I don't know what happened internally (and Apple is well-known for lack of communication on such things), but they definitely shipped their Maps product with some significant shortcomings. And they apparently (I'm not too familiar with this) didn't list and engage in some recent pertinent hiring until they shipped. I wonder whether the delay in recruitment was in part to avoid spilling the beans on what was coming.

And I wonder whether they planned for their user base being forced to "beta" the thing as a source to rapidly identify and triage failure points.

As I recall now, aren't they also basing it partly off of open, public mapping data? And if that is the case, what better way to force data refinement than to force usage of same upon the public (or a significant chunk representing their iOS 6 user base)?

Of course, they may not have suspected -- or communicated sufficiently, internally -- how bad things might/would be.

But, someone had to know about these problems, to a significant degree. How else were they going to approach the attendant problems? On the face of it, it smells like a beta -- certainly from a data perspective.

Image-wise, this is about 1 year after Jobs' passing. And for this very image-conscious company, I wonder how things got to this point. Certainly the pundits have been looking for signs of, erm, 'negative changes' including citing Jobs', erm, 'manic perfection'.

As for myself, you may be right. I've been getting pretty "quippy" and at least somewhat sarcastic, lately. It is probably time for me to give commenting a break, for a while. And for that feedback, I thank you (seriously).

Regards

The letters do read quite similar. Steve's original letter was addressed to his employees though, which sends a different signal IMO.

Yes. And I should've added a note at the beginning that instead of a public letter, it should've been internal (like Steve's).

I think the Maps team already reports to Scott Forstall...

I believe they do as well. It actually dawned on me while crafting this letter that Forstall has two misses in the last year - Siri and Maps. Then this article came out: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/29/does-apple-have-a-sco...