The map problems were an embarrassing misstep that strives for perfection in its products and,in the eyes of consumers,often gets pretty close to the mark.Its track record in delivering quality is one reason Apple is now the most valuable public company in the world.
According to a story by The New York Times,the Maps app was not at all part of the original plans for the iphone. Steve jobs thoughts of having the application on the phone just weeks before the announcement because he thought it would help show off the multi touch display better.
After that he appoints Two engineers who put together a maps app for the presentation in three weeks, said a former Apple engineer who worked on iPhone software, and who declined to be named because he did not want to speak publicly about his previous employer. The company hastily cut a deal with Google to use its map data.The last minute inclusion of Maps also tells us why the original iPhone did not have GPS, which was then added in the iPhone 3G next year
At the time, Apple and Google had generally friendly relations, and Google’s chief executive at the time, Eric E. Schmidt, served on Apple’s board. But the relationship chilled in 2008 after Google began building more and more iPhone-like features into Android. That year, Mr. Jobs drove to Google’s headquarters and got into a screaming match with Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the head of its Android development team, Andy Rubin, as he tried to discourage them from copying the iPhone, according to an account of the meeting in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Mr. Jobs.
As the iPhone began to catch on with the public, Apple executives were surprised by the popularity of the map function, according to a former Apple executive who did not want to be named so as not to damage his relations with the company. It began to bother executives how much data about the behavior of iPhone users was flowing back to Google, which could see the coordinates of every iPhone user who downloaded a map, the former executive said.
That same year, Apple suffered an embarrassing black eye when it introduced MobileMe, a service that was intended to give iPhone users a convenient way to wirelessly synchronize e-mail, contacts and calendar appointments with computer applications. The summer introduction was so seriously marred by technology problems that Mr. Jobs fired the head of the MobileMe team and replaced him with Eddy Cue, a trusted executive who oversaw the company’s iTunes Store. Former Apple executives said the MobileMe fiasco was a symptom of a lack of appreciation among Apple executives, including Mr. Jobs, of the differences between running an online store like iTunes, where people download music, apps and books, and an online service that is used constantly and must be reliable, like e-mail and maps. Apple’s secrecy around new products also makes it hard to adequately stress-test such services. While MobileMe operated well in private tests by Apple employees, it melted down once it became available to the public, these executives said.
“The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,” Mr. Jobs wrote in an e-mail to Apple employees at the time. “And learn we will.”
With that experience behind him and tensions with Google increasing, Mr. Jobs set out to build Apple’s own map service in 2009, with the acquisition of a start-up called Placebase. Later, Apple bought two other start-ups focused on 3-D mapping technologies.
Apple executives have said they felt the company needed to get out of the Google relationship in part because under the terms of their deal, Google would not let Apple offer important map features like turn-by-turn spoken directions. A Google spokesman, Nate Tyler, declined to comment.
While Google knew that Apple eventually wanted to build its own maps, there had been no indication that it would do so this year, since there was about a year left on the contract between the two companies, according to people briefed on the negotiations who did not want to be named discussing internal matters.
So Google was blindsided when Apple announced in June that it would replace Google’s maps with its own in a new version of its iOS mobile operating system, and was left scrambling to figure out how to respond, these people said. Google is now developing its own maps app for iOS and plans to release it before the end of the year.
According to a former Apple executive who has been in touch with his old colleagues, Apple was caught off guard by the map problems. “They’re embarrassed by it,” he said. Many of the problems are a result of merging map data, some of it flawed, from many sources.
At the same time, the complaints do not seem to have damaged the response to the iPhone 5, which was released just over a week ago with the new operating system on it. Apple said it sold more than five million of the phones by the end of the first weekend of sales. People with older iPhones and iPads have installed the iOS 6 software with the new maps service on more than 100 million devices, Apple said. The company has had better luck with other online efforts. The iTunes store remains the biggest seller of music in the country, and the iCloud service that replaced MobileMe has been relatively trouble-free. But other Internet efforts have been disappointments, including Ping, a social network for iTunes users that Apple is shutting down after customers largely ignored it. Siri, a feature first introduced with the iPhone 4S last year, has been criticized for its unreliability and frequent downtime.
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