Anyone know how much it would've cost to keep google maps?
Just two years ago I had Google Maps send me a few miles in the wrong direction and plant me in the middle of an unfinished housing development when I wanted to go to a shopping mall. It was a mistake, I reported it, and it was eventually fixed. It's not as bad as getting stranded in the middle of a national park, but
a) It should be obvious that the middle of a national park isn't where a town is supposed to be, and
b) If it's not obvious because you are a tourist, maybe you shouldn't be blindly trusting your Maps app and only having enough gas to make it to town?
That's going to have real long-term consequences I'm not sure Apple even understands yet. For instance look at how quickly the tech crowd embraced Google now on the iPhone? The hole in Apple's armor makes it easier for people to accept that other things are also better. These things really can snowball, and when you're protecting a luxury brand that's a really serious issue.
You simply can't screw up what might be the most universally used feature (maps) on the entire phone. It's the one thing, next to maybe the dialer and messaging, that people interact with more than anything else. Screwing that up makes all of your polish, usability, and "coolness" irrelevant. Instead of arrogantly shoving crap out the door and expecting everyone to love it just because, maybe that's the time to invest that money and do the quality control you have to do to make it work. Hire 10,000 people to drive all over the world making sure you got it right. Google does something close to that (those Google maps cars improve the accuracy of their data ten-fold), and if you want to compete you should too.
Now you have to put the genie back in the bottle and hope the damage isn't long-lasting. It's probably going to be even more expensive and I'm not sure you can.
You can't expect any company to hire 10,000 people to work N amount of hours/day/years just so you can polish your app 5% more when that same polish can come from users submitting error reports. That's just nonsense.
Just to clarify, these people weren't driving into the desert, just into a town. The GPS took them 70 kilometres away and left them in a position unable to find a way out.
I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering going the Android route, especially since I think Google's OS and services are improving much more rapidly than Apple's.
A customer-centric chief obsessing about software quality, with $70bn sitting in offshore banks, would probably make a different one.
A very popular dining and shopping center in Atlanta shows up erroneously on my quiet side street. I flag down people in cars when I see they're confused and tell them about how to report the errors. Nobody knows it's there. 1.5 months of doing this and it's still not fixed.
In contrast when I reported my address at the wrong end of the street ( over a year ago ) Google fixed it in a week AND sent me a confirmation email. I want my Google maps back on iOS6!
Frankly, I don't understand Apple's decision in the context of the idea of being customer-focused. In other words, if you, as an organization, make decisions for the benefit of your customers --or, at the very least not to their detriment-- how can you justify pushing out Maps and not keeping Google Maps on there?
OK, I get it. It would have cost more. A lot more. Fine. That's your problem. Pay Google for another five years exactly because you care about your customers. At the same time, put out your own Maps app and --funny enough-- compete on the merits of the app, not the hype.
If in five years you can't turn Maps into an app that people will choose over Google Maps, then, well, why are you in the mapping business in the first place?