Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/29/does-apple-have-a-scott-forstall-problem

by olivercameron • 14 years ago

134 124 14 years ago

tech.fortune.cnn.com

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

Forstall has been called "Apple's chief asshole"[0] - he channels Steve Jobs's approach of being a douchebag, but doesn't seem to have acquired the same level of perfectionism as Jobs.

0: http://www.dailytech.com/Apples+chief+Ahole+Forstall+Keeps+S...

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

Maybe Apple has a "if you take the different parts of Steve Job's management style in isolation, they start to look horrible" problem.

batista• 14 years ago

He also gives me that impression when I see him on Keynotes, one of a power grabbing, back-stabbing kind of guy. Which could or could not be true, I'm talking purely from a "face-reading" standpoint.

The exact opposite of that would be Bob Mansfield.

bronxbomber92• 14 years ago

I've seen each VP (except Mansfield) talk in person and I have gotten a very different impression of Forstall. He was one of the most impressive VPs in my eyes (he talked a lot about his passion for bettering accessibility and making life-altering impacts with iOS).

paulschreiber• 14 years ago

Fosrtall is the kind of guy who would sell you a used car and hit on your wife.

contextfree• 14 years ago

It sounds more like they have a services/big data problem, + maybe a Windows XP-like "good enough" problem (leading to new features and changes being viewed more skeptically)

pkamb2• 14 years ago

> Inside Apple, tension has brewed for years over the [skeuomorphism] issue. Apple iOS SVP Scott Forstall is said to push for skeuomorphic design, while industrial designer Jony Ive and other Apple higher-ups are said to oppose the direction. "You could tell who did the product based on how much glitz was in the UI," says one source intimately familiar with Apple’s design process.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670760/will-apples-tacky-softwa...

nilsbunger• 14 years ago

Very interesting. Of course, Steve Jobs was also in favor of skeuomorphic design, so it's not like Forstall is the sole reason I "find my friends" in stitched leather.

Samuel_Michon• 14 years ago

Stranger still, it is said that the stitched leather theme was modeled after the upholstery in Jobs' Gulfstream jet! [0] Both iCal on OS X and Find My Friends on iOS have the same motif.

“But before Forstall, it was Steve Jobs who encouraged the skeuomorphic approach, some say. “iCal’s leather-stitching was literally based on a texture in his Gulfstream jet,” says the former senior UI designer. “There was lots of internal email among UI designers at Apple saying this was just embarrassing, just terrible.”

[0] http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670760/will-apples-tacky-softwa...

dastbe5• 14 years ago

That's not skeumorphism; it's a style choice. If I had to simulate ripping the top piece of paper off the notepad in notes to clear it, then that would be skeumorphic design.

stevenleeg• 14 years ago

Since when has Siri been "an embarrassment for Apple?"

esolyt2• 14 years ago

Always. But especially after Google Now.

weaksauce2• 14 years ago

That's what I was wondering. It's not perfect, but what it does it does well for me. Setting timers, alarms, etc... all work pretty well.

timdorr• 14 years ago

It's had a similar number of issues, as compared to Maps. The difference is, it didn't replace or introduce a must-have feature in iOS. As a result, it's failures were something users are able to overlook because Siri is still, essentially, a toy feature. It's not key to the phone's operation; heck it's non-obvious that it's even a feature because no where on the interface indicates that it exists (it's a hidden long-press action on the home button).

Maps, however, is crucial to most people that use an iPhone. After telephony and web functions, it's probably the next most used feature. So, any failure by it, even if it's slight, is amplified. Yes, you can use Google Maps on the web or another app (MapQuest should really be capitalizing on this opportunity to reclaim some relevance), but it's one of the default icons on the home screen and where most people are going to head first. It would be like the dialer not being able to call certain phone numbers or the text message not working with certain recipients. It's a vital function and has to work.

I would say Siri is probably more of a failure than Maps, but because of it's non-essential nature, that feature is able to get away with what Maps can't.

TheGateKeeper2• 14 years ago

> Maps, however, is crucial to most people that use an iPhone

Citation please. Nobody I know uses google maps, even when we travel (which is a lot).

joejohnson• 14 years ago

Since lame tech bloggers decided Apple is ruined sans Jobs.

OSButler• 14 years ago

The biggest issue with Siri was the same as with the current Maps blunder, where it works well for US users, but causes issues for everyone else.

There are some videos of non-native English speakers trying to use Siri on their new 4s (before additional languages were added), which are quite funny actually.

The same goes for the new Maps, which seems to have most of its issues related to countries outside the US.

But especially with iOS6, it's actually the first time for me personally where I feel like I'm downgrading my device instead of upgrading it: youtube app - gone, maps - replaced with inferior alternative, ...

tlogan2• 14 years ago

Does it work for you? I stil have to meet a single person which actually can ask Siri something and Siri understands it and gives reasonable answer... I was under impression that it did not work because I'm ESL speaker: but it also does not work for people who speak english very well.

Aha and there is class action lawsuit: http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2012/06/12/class-action-lawsuit-file...

Here is the quote:

   Ryan asked Siri, “What is a class action?”

   Siri told her, “I found this meeting.”

arrrg3• 14 years ago

Works for me. If it doesn’t, it’s because I asked something Siri inherently does not understand.

I think it’s pretty useful and use it sometimes.

mikeryan• 14 years ago

Siri works fabulously for me. Here's how I use it, these use cases work consistently.

1. Call my wife at her office. 2. Text My Wife - I'll be home in 15 minutes. 3. Set a timer for 15 minutes. 4. Where's the closest Mc Donalds.

Obviously I'm not looking for a magic speaking encyclopedia of knowledge, that being said my primary use case for Siri is in the car, and for 90% of what I need to do it works fine.

BTW I just asked Siri "What is a class action" and it asked me if I wanted to search the web for "What is a class action" and it found the definition. I'll give it this though, whether automated or manually Siri's been pretty consistently tuned to get better and better as its gone along which was likely to happen as it got a larger and larger dataset to work with.

scottchin• 14 years ago

I was very impressed by Siri the other day. I asked "Find me pictures of Shang Tsung from Mortal Kombat"

And Siri responded by asking whether I wanted to search for "Shang Tsung from Mortal Kombat", getting the spelling exactly correct.

ralfd4• 14 years ago

I am German and we didn't get all Siri features before iOS 6 (wolfram Alpha is still missing). But I tried it more in the last days and am really impressed! Even when I thought "oh, I mumbled the word, Siri won't get it" it was correctly recognized. I most use it as text to speech for SMS. And checking Fußball Bundesliga works good. (But only first league, no info available for second league.)

Since iOS 6 (or at east I never noticed before?) there is also an info button on the Siri screen which shows example querys/commands. This hels a lot!

zmmmmm• 14 years ago

Might not be so much about functionality as that it was down an awful lot when it was launched. To the point where several people I know gave up relying on it - a feature that works less than 95% of the time quickly becomes 0% useful because the small fraction of failures is so frustrating and annoying that you avoid the whole thing (until recently this problem applied to speech recognition in general, but it's just finally getting over that hump, I think).

denzil_correa• 14 years ago

Forstall seems to be a "copy" of Jobs. I am not sure if it's a good thing.

X-Istence• 14 years ago

I don't understand why someone needs to be fired just because they had one or two bad products. Why would you throw away the rest of the knowledge that this person has? Demote them, put them on new projects, place them where they are stronger and have them work on another project, but outright removing someone seems like it is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

blinkingled• 14 years ago

Fresh perspectives matter sometimes in product's lifecycle. Working on same stuff for years you run a high chance of developing tunnel vision. If there is a new but capable person with different vision, there is a good chance something new and appealing might come of it.

Case in point - Steven Sinofsky and Windows 7.

I dont know what other project they can put someone like Scott Forstall on without even indirectly becoming related to OS development at Apple.

weaksauce2• 14 years ago

The reason from Jobs:

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-07/tech/30043798...

Makes sense to some extent at a company like apple. Maybe you get two chances but if you don't have the foresight to see how important maps are to people you might not be the best fit for the job.

dantiberian• 14 years ago

Does Fortune have an interest in creating pageview's by making this Scott Forstall's problem?

martythemaniak• 14 years ago

Well, I guess the knives are coming out. These kinds of distractions won't help Apple with a pack of hungry companies wanting to take it down.

Fjslfj2• 14 years ago

Actually, it's an Eddy Cue problem.

czr80• 14 years ago

Can you elaborate on why you say that?

lazugod2• 14 years ago

"Eddy Cue is Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services." (from http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/eddy-cue.html)

Fjslfj2• 14 years ago

Almost all of the gripes people have with Apple Internet services and software involve Cue's products, not Forstall's. But because Cue doesn't have any interest in the top job, and because of his seniority, he ducks blame every time.

Bud3• 14 years ago

Who at Fortune deserves to be fired for its recent long string of incredibly idiotic articles about Apple, which have been panned here and elsewhere, then?

I think the new Maps app is fantastic; the data accuracy leaves a bit to be desired, but I notice that those doing the most high-profile complaining point to errors in rural England, rural Ontario, etc. Here in the Bay Area, the data is working fine for me as well.

It is not shocking to me that a map database that is a few months old is less mature than one like Google's, which is the product of a decade's effort, and also the product of 5 years' worth of improvements riding the back of iOS users' crowd-sourced data. Now Apple has that data coming into its database, instead of flying out the door to Google's.

Maps is likely to improve, and fast.

In any case, blaming Forstall is idiotic and talking about firing him is Fortune-level idiotic. He made great things at NeXT, Mac OS X is great, Siri is great, and Maps is a work in progress that shows great promise.

Have you tried reloading map data and zooming in and out on maps in Google Maps vs. Apple Maps in an area with EDGE or otherwise bad internet coverage? Apple's app wins hands-down versus reloading non-vector map tiles.

st0p2• 14 years ago

Newsflash: A lot of people live in rural England, rural Ontario and Rural Holland. Besides, it can't find places like central station in Amsterdam (hardly rural). I don't care whether it's the app or the data, I don't care that it's working great in the bay area. What I do care about is that I had a perfectly working mapping solution, and now I have a second class thing that's just not working. I don't know about you, but IMHO having wrong directions is even worse than having no directions.

Bud3• 14 years ago

True, and I granted that point already. However, a lot of people live in China, too, and it's being widely reported that Apple Maps is much better than Google Maps' data, in China. I'll just give one link, but a little googling around proves the point quite well:

http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/gadget/314283/apple-maps-bet...

You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of errors.

And what you have now is both Google Maps (via Safari), and also a new Maps app that is internally superior and relies on a less-mature dataset which will mature quickly and give Google some much-needed motivation to improve its data as well. I'm not sure why this is such a big disaster.

Edit: By the way, Apple Maps finds Amsterdam Centraal (not "Central") Station just fine, if you spell it correctly. I just checked; it finds the exact same place as Google Maps.

tlogan2• 14 years ago

Working great in Bay Area? Who told you that?

I was under impression that this all similar to "antena gate" (kinda not big deal), but iOS maps are really really bad even in Bay Area.

EDIT: Here is an example: Search for "428 University Ave, Palo Alto": you will end up in Los Gatos.

Jabbles• 14 years ago

Defending the maps app as "a few months old" does not excuse the fact that it is not as good as the app it replaced. I'm sure it will improve in the future and may lead to improvements in all map apps as a result of increased competition.

(I've never used Apple Maps.)

Bud3• 14 years ago

I didn't defend the maps app in that way; I was defending the immaturity of the map data.

The app, as I said, is superior in my opinion to the Google Maps app. It zooms better, loads faster, looks better, has better layout, is prettier, and has turn-by-turn directions and 3D features that were absent in the Google Maps app. Remember that the app and its functionality is completely separate from the database it points to. None of the map data is stored in the app.

lazugod2• 14 years ago

Maps are an interesting area for bikeshedding to occur, because any two people can both be experts in their area yet both experience wildly different results.

crikli• 14 years ago

There are many other places in the world than the Bay area, and my god am I ever sick of seeing this myopic perspective represented on HN.

rsl7• 14 years ago

So wait, it works for you in the Bay area so you don't get what everyone else is complaining about? I'm laughing too hard to type accurately.

bitcartel• 14 years ago

There is bad data in the Bay Area which some consider dangerous.

"Having a medical emergency? Then he might not want to use your iPhone five to search for an emergency room."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ketYUfQX9f4

ralfd4• 14 years ago

I agree. But also:

> Maps is likely to improve, and fast.

This is going to be the real test for Apple. They need to fix stuff, they know that, it will be interesting to see when improvements will be noticible.

Cook spoke of 500 million searches in two weeks. If only 1 promille triggered a feedback or "report problem", that would be 500.000 change requests. How can you brute-force this massive amount of data?

rustynails773• 14 years ago

>I agree

A quick Google search will tell you that there are non-trivial problems all over the world in major cities at major landmarks with Apple maps.

It's nice that you agree with the parent poster that Apple Maps are fantastic, but let me say that I don't think so. There are far too many obvious and MAJOR cockups (eg. Hong Kong is misplaced - it's not even on the island, Tokyo's main railway is missing, etc.) ... but you think that's Fantastic??

I will point you to Garmin and TomTom as two examples of maps that FAR exceed Apple's "fantastic" offering.

In 6 months time, the landscape will (hopefully) be different ... but to call this offering fantastic is ignorant.

rhizome• 14 years ago

I thought this sounded familiar:

http://nerdtwilight.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/apples-steve-jo...

fleitz• 14 years ago

Another way to look at the accumulation of power during Jobs absence is other members of the executive team stepping up to the plate while another is absent...

robomartin2• 14 years ago

Nah. I don't agree with the premise of this article. This was not one person's decision. Many actors had to be involved in the decision making process. For some reason Apple decided that kicking Google off the platform was worth the abuse they'd have to endure with Maps.

Those who keep saying "Maps is great" need to leave an egocentric view and realize that there are millions of users all around the world with different experiences.

According to the apology letter they serve about 500 million searches in one week. That means two billion searches per month. What does this mean in therms of customer experience?

http://www.mtonic.com/applemaps/

According to this either 60% of the locations either incorrect or missing altogether. I'll be generous and propose that Maps, world-wide, might have an average of 5% incorrect or missing locations. I don't know if this is too low or too high. It's just a number that I pulled out of my imagination in order to get a sense of proportion.

If only 5% of the data is wrong and we have two billion searches per month, that means 100 million bad searches per month. I'll let the reader guess as to how many users that affects. It certainly is in the millions.

If data errors are larger than that the situation is far worst. Again, I'll leave it up to the reader to guess as to how much user anger would trigger Apple to post an apology letter on the front page of their site.

If you live here in California, and, in particular, the Bay Area, please refrain from posting how "Maps is great and it is beautiful". You do not represent the experience of the vast majority of users who had almost no issues whatsoever with Google Maps.

Oh, yes, on the whole "Maps is beautiful" mantra. Who the f* cares? 3D view? Who the f* cares? First make them dead accurate, then add eye candy if it makes sense. Accuracy is far more important than bling when it comes to maps. Nobody is going to want to use a beautiful map that takes you to the wrong place. And 3D view. Really? Get it right first. Then play.

pilsetnieks• 14 years ago

Everybody knows by now that the maps are no good. I think that at this point the rage and anger is about overpromising and knowingly shipping an unfinished product of insufficient quality, something Apple has never (arguably) done before.

As it says in the article, the same could be applied to Siri but Siri came with the "beta" warning label, a lot of people understand that voice recognition and that kind of pseudo-AI is really hard, and it was better than anything competitors had to offer, which, obviously, is not the case with maps.

pmjordan• 14 years ago

...something Apple has never (arguably) done before.

Well, pretty much every 10.x.0 OSX release has had some nasty regressions in it, but they're generally not quite as easy to spot as the maps fiasco. What's worse is that this isn't a new product that starts off a bit crap with the view of improving it over time - there have been a few examples of these as well.

Instead, from the users' point of view, the maps update falls plainly into the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" category. Users don't give a damn about contracts between Apple and Google. The Maps app has been there since iPhoneOS 1.0 and it's not had any drastic changes since then, despite its tremendous popularity. I find it baffling that they didn't release the new map material as an extra mode with more features (3D, turn by turn navigation), in addition to Google's map material for the classic 2D view until iOS7 comes along. That would probably have completely avoided the problem and given Apple an extra year to get their data into shape. The new features, although a little half-baked, would still have been seen as an improvement by users, whereas now they're just blinded by the seething rage of having the core functionality yanked out underneath them.

leif2• 14 years ago

"If only 5% of the data is wrong, and we have 2 billion searches per month, that means 100 million ..."

Please go back to stats class.

mmcnickle• 14 years ago

Please leave more useful comments and explain the supposed error.

CamperBob2• 14 years ago

Those who keep saying "Maps is great" need to leave an egocentric view and realize that there are millions of users all around the world with different experiences.

I have a theory about these people -- they are the ones who never realized that you could search Maps for place names.

If you search for street addresses, both Maps implementations perform OK. But the strength of Google's database is that you can type almost anything within reason into the Maps search box and get where you want to go. For my first few weeks of iPhone usage, whenever I wanted to find a nearby "Starbucks" or "Barnes and Noble" or $name_of_local_restaurant, I'd do the search in Safari, pick a likely result, and then click on the page's address link, assuming there was one, in order to open it in Maps. Eventually I realized that I could type the search string directly into Maps, and that made life a lot easier. If that stopped working or became less effective on the iPhone that I use for navigation in the car, I would scream bloody murder.

So my guess is that the people who aren't complaining about Apple's maps application are either living in metro areas that were carefully vetted by the data provider, searching for street addresses directly, or both.

voxmatt• 14 years ago

I'm not trying to apologize for Apple's mess -- and it is a mess -- but your theory doesn't hold for me.

Some places are genuinely fine: I'm in San Francisco and the maps really are pretty damn good (in SF, I'll actually use the word good). Of course, this is right in Apple's back yard, but the reports seem to indicate that most major U.S. cities are in good shape (mind you, I'm talking about maps & places, not flyover's 3D views, which are a whole different story). And, I legitimately find the link to Yelp's reviews more useful than Google's place markings, but Google's are more consistently available.

Not to say that this isn't a huge mess, but simply that there are places where "Maps is good" ("Maps is great" is a bit much no matter where you are!).

taligent• 14 years ago

People need to understand that Apple is taking a long term view of this.

And we know this because they didn't setup relationships with any of the local data providers in each country. They just setup a single one with Yelp.

ams6110• 14 years ago

You are assuming that both the bad map data and the searches are evenly distributed across all locations. If their data are good in the most-searched areas, the number of users affected is much smaller.

rustynails773• 14 years ago

There are enough articles that re-enforce that Apple Maps (in its current incarnation) are sorely lacking, even in popular areas... A few examples,

- Park Hyatt Tokyo - Tokyo Railway Station (the MAIN station) - Paddington Station in London - Melbourne Aus and Frankfurt Germany Airport roads - Hong Kong is misplaced http://www.ausbt.com.au/6-reasons-travellers-should-be-wary-...

The list goes on across the net. I support several other posters in that only an Apple fan would say that the maps are good overall. All you will hear from these people is how TomTom had a bad map 5 years ago, or how Garmin is missing a 3 year old suburb in their area. The fact is that in this instance, Apple stuffed up severely.

It was a brave decision of Apple to go ahead with this version of maps - they would have known full well just how bad it was. Maybe it's the kick in the butt that Apple needed to catch up quickly. I expect that within 6 months, the situation will be a lot better for Apple.

ralfd4• 14 years ago

> According to this either 60% of the locations either incorrect or missing altogether.

This test makes a bad comparison. See here:

http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591169

Codhisattva• 14 years ago

"Nah. I don't agree with the premise of this article. This was not one person's decision." Except in any corporation there is always one person who says "Ship it" and it does - regardless of anyone else's point of view. Was that Forstall? Most likely.

nikcub• 14 years ago

I can't imagine that the decision to drop Google early was made by the executive committee without getting a sign-off from Forstall that they would be ready with a new Maps app.

The ordering in making that fateful Google decision must have been first to decide if their own alternative was going to be close to ready. At that point somebody aggregated the data from the Maps team and made a forecast that said they would be.

Further, the failure of Maps has made iOS 6 itself a failure. You can tell from the marketing materials that the new Maps application was the headline feature of iOS 6. You can reverse engineer their thinking - we are dropping Google so this new release of the OS needs something special to hold it up. That 'something special' was the 3D view.

People are forgetting that Maps was marketed as a better application than Google Maps.

So that leaves a few points where it went wrong:

a) whoever provided the input to the group that decided to drop Google in saying that they would be ready

b) whoever decided to drop Google based on that info

c) whoever was responsible for delivering the finished Maps product

d) whoever was responsible for pinning the success of iOS 6 on Maps

e) whoever was responsible for testing Maps

f) whoever was responsible for raising user expectation by marketing Maps and iOS 6 as being 'better' and 'the best'

As head of iOS and a member of the exec committee, a lot of those paths lead back to Forstall.

glenra4• 14 years ago

> According to this either 60% of the locations either incorrect or missing altogether.

According to a followup article ( http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps ) the old Maps app fails this exact test at least as badly. It just fails a bit differently. Whereas the new Maps app often says it can't find anything, the old one would for a similarly sized group of searches silently err on the side of finding a match that was wrong.

ars• 14 years ago

It only failed when he left out the country name from the search. Once he added the country name the new map barely changed, but the new one got dramatically better.

The problem is very simple: The same city name shows in in multiple countries and the old map just didn't know which one he wanted.

kalid• 14 years ago

I really don't get the "Maps are great for me" apologists either. It reads like "Typhoon in Japan? Looked outside, weather is great here."

I'm sure TomTom and Apple cleaned up the data for areas where their programmers and bosses live. Even in Seattle, I searched for "Pizza" and it didn't find the place down the street [I had to search for "Pizzareia" for it to show up].

When you see reports of major airports being missing or mislocated, you can't use the "Well my local airport shows up fine" defense. It's like an inverse Tu Quoque fallacy [you hit a problem, I didn't, therefore the problem isn't there].

stretchwithme• 14 years ago

I have a TomTom. And the first error I see in their data is 200 feet from my house.

Gargade in, garbage out.

eaurouge• 14 years ago

Why people don't seem to get this is beyond me. Releasing Siri and Maps early were purely strategic decisions. Clearly both Siri and Maps can be improved more rapidly if some of the development is crowdsourced. Apple would believe (and rightly so) that the brand has enough excess credibility/goodwill with the public to ride this out.

Google has done this repeatedly with products like GOOG-411, a data collection exercise that was promptly shut down once it had served its purpose. Apple is taking a risk here because Maps is not some 'free' offering like GOOG-411, but they've done the math and will come out ahead when the dust settles.

eurleif• 14 years ago

GOOG-411 worked well, in my experience; and it also let you make free calls. I think it was probably a PR win for Google.

nachteilig3• 14 years ago

As much as I dislike Forstall--particularly the way he presents--I don't think we can lay this all at his feet. You can bet that even Steve had a hand in this decision.

outside12342• 14 years ago

No, Apple has a "liberal arts problem" in that they don't seem to have the hard core folks to do algorithms in the way that Google does. Apple has a lot of smart people, but can you really see them building a self driving car with tons of lasers spinning on it in order to have super accurate maps? I can't. But that's what Google did.

Its also a "device centric problem": I'm always struck when talking with someone from Apple about how device centric they are thinking (running algorithms locally that should run in the cloud, etc.). The cloud is eating the world and device centric thinking, while its done them well for a while, is increasingly incorrect.

001sky• 14 years ago

No, Apple has a "liberal arts problem"

-- Seriously? This is "analysis"?

A "a self driving car with tons of lasers spinning on it"? Learn before you speak. The noticeable problems are not subtle: clouds covering cities in the UK, buildings not being named on College Campus, etc. Stadia 0.5km out of place. They are obvious, silly, dealbreaker problems for Soccer Moms and Sociology FFS. Algo's are not going to solve this cr@p, its Cartpgraphy 101...and in any event, Google has to hand fit the data that they do have, for a variety of reasons, to sat-nav visuals (including incosistent basemaps).

outside12342• 14 years ago

Sorry - I shouldn't have dumped on the liberal arts - maybe I should have used "left brain."

Algorithms are indeed solving a lot of these problems for Google. They are reading the street signs and shop signs for peet's sake!

pbharrin2• 14 years ago

Totally agree. I know, from many sources that a lot of human labor goes into making the Google data so good. They used to give out cookies to employees who would filter search results as porn/not porn. Algos can only get you so far.

snowwrestler2• 14 years ago

If the cloud is eating the world, why did Google buy a mobile OS company and then a mobile device company? If Apple is too device-centric, why does Siri send every query to their data center instead of processing it on the phone?

In short, I don't think you've thought deeply about what you're writing.

dvhh• 14 years ago

The whole flow was amazing. 1. Acquire external talent 2. Fire google 3. Tell the press that the new map gonna be amazing 4. Apologize for the whole mess 5. Sell 3rd party map on the app store 6. Profit

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I've got a question on the maps fiasco, is it possible that Google never shared any usage data with Apple and somehow Apple thought nobody really used the App all that much? Seems like the click/search stream in maps is a tremendous asset for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it comes with a unique undisguisable identifier with each request. Where you go an when you go there, both part of the query when you use maps. Its an advertiser's wet dream I would think.

Perhaps Scott realized that and decided to take it back from Google? I don't know. I do know it is pointless to try to second guess the executive staff of a company like Apple (or Google, or Groupon, or Zynga, Etc) even though it is fun.

programminggeek• 14 years ago

I think you'd have to be a fool to think Apple didn't see this coming, but in reality it a big deal for Apple, but not an earth shattering one. To truly improve things like Siri and Maps, you need real world data, user feedback, etc.

I'm sure they are keenly aware of the shortfalls of their own software, as much as they are of the hardware they make. That's the whole point of QA. What pushing out products early does is let you start getting feedback on the known unknowns - problems you'd expect to have but didn't know exactly where they might be, and the unknown unknowns - problems you didn't see coming at all.

pbharrin2• 14 years ago

YES!

Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

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