My take from the outside. Senior management decided to ship an incomplete project, and this manager is taking the fall. They could have evaluated the offering, made the hard decisions that they shouldn't remove Google Maps yet, and delayed the release.
Thing is, there wasn't much interesting meat on the iPhone 5 release, so I'm sure they were scrambling for any sort of "feature" to pad out the release.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm not sure how much better Apple could have made Maps before launching it. The thing that gets me is that I can only view driving directions fully zoomed out or fully in (rather than being able to zoom in and out). However, in terms of map accuracy, their data is coming from TomTom/Tele Atlas. Google's data is better. Not only that, but Google has been working hard on local search. Apple simply doesn't have that data. I've really yet to hear how Apple could have launched a better product. Google has been getting data for many years now and when Google Maps launched, it didn't have nearly as complete data. As users used it, data improved. Apple has less chance for improvement because Apple doesn't do local search and non-phone maps in the way that Google does.
It's why I think Apple should make a web interface to provide an easy way for people to add businesses and make corrections via their browser.
I mean, I vaguely remember when Google Maps switched from Navteq to Tele Atlas for a while and users disliked the Tele Atlas data. However, if you don't own your own mapping data, you need to buy it from someone selling. Given Nokia's ownership of Navteq, it seems unlikely that Apple would have gotten that data.
Other than improving the data over time, what else was egregiously wrong? On the data side, I think it takes time with the app being used by the public to correct that. If they were to make the hard decision not to ship Apple Maps, would the data be in pretty much the same situation a year later?
Maybe it's just me, but I'm not sure how much better Apple could have made Maps before launching it.
I stopped trying to use Apple Maps here in Warsaw, Poland, simply because they get so many of the basics wrong.
Any official document lists my street name as Skorochód-Majewskiego. Even Nokia's new offering can find it. Apple though? Nope, not even anything in the autocomplete list. The only match occurs if you type in the full Walentego Skorochód-Majewskiego. This is true for many streets here. So on that level, their offering is useless.
There were loads of other bizarre issues at launch - loads of parks had their names written in what looked like Chinese characters. Out of sheer annoyance, I went through and marked them all, not expecting much, and sure enough, three weeks later, the names started to clear up.
And this is without going into how obscenely ridiculous it was to see Warsaw's main airport being marked with the German word "Flughafen" in its title.
Nokia owns Navteq, which is one of the premier providers of GIS data. They're actually better positioned then Apple in this space.
I'm not sure that the data's to blame. For comparison, I've just given CoPilot Live a try with a couple of other streets (Korotyńskiego and Dickensa to be precise), and the UI presented them to without any difficulties.
These aren't new streets, they're on every map out there, and I'm convinced that this is a programming issue of not handling the data correctly. It's not even a case of doing cleverness with letters such as ń or ó - it's a complete failure altogether.
Firstly, Apple certainly could have provided public transit directions. Plenty of third party apps already did this (or at least claimed to), so there's no real excuse there.
Another issue is the goofy cosmetic problems with the 3D maps. Of course, you could argue that it's still "a data problem," but it's not the type of data problem that magically gets better as more users use the app.
Lastly, there are usability issues that have nothing to do with data. As another user noted, I can only view navigation either fully zoomed in (with slightly variable tilt that doesn't even work well) or fully zoomed out. The overview shows a list of all the turns, but doesn't let me click on each one to zoom in on it (like every other directions app I've seen). It doesn't show speed or any other useful statistics except for estimated duration and distance.
The old GPS app I used on my iPhone 4, which I believe was Navigon, was a far superior product even ignoring the lackluster data of Apple Maps.
Sigh, we need to stop with that annoying "maps will magically get better with usage".
No, they won't. Stop claiming that. There is no magic algorith m to fixup maps based on people being given wrong data. Even if some people will give some feedback, that requires humans to process that input and translate it into map changes. Which can take a loong time.
They will get better with that feedback. Without the feedback, there is no way to improve them. It's simply not possible for 1 company to go around the entire world mapping every business and address in any reasonable timeframe. The only way to do it is by accepting and processing feedback.
I think their problem is much worse than just being a question of improving data quality. They seem to get data from a lot of very different sources, and those simply do not fit together.
For example, in Stockholm Apple's map still shows most buildings as lying in the middle of some street. On the other hand, only relatively few businesses seem to be located in some kind of building. There seem to be quite obvious, and systematic, errors all over the place.
Compared to the last time Google switched mapping databases, which I think was about three years ago, Apple Maps (for my town at least) has been remarkably accurate. For several months, Google Maps was putting my home address more than a mile from where I actually live (right in the middle of a major city, so a mile is a world away), and it refused to parse addresses for at least a couple of major commercial roads with unusual names. I don't think I've been able to find a single comparable problem with Apple Maps. Visual glitches don't ruin my day nearly as much as refusing to parse a business' address or placing it a mile away from where it is.
I still use Google Maps (via the web now), though, since I prefer the way it presents traffic data.
Scott Forstall (the guy in senior management directly responsible for maps) was also fired, so this doesn’t seem like a pawn sacrifice at all – unless when you say senior management you actually mean Tim Cook and only Tim Cook.
Ultimately it was Tim Cook's decision whether to ship it now or wait another year, just like it would've been Steve Jobs the last one to decide whether a new product is ready for prime-time or not.
If Tim Cook thought the Maps isn't ready, and he really wanted to ship it this year, then he could've decided not to do it anyway, but in the same time fire the people responsible for not delivering it on time. At least that would've saved them the public embarrassment.
Tim Cook is the CEO. It's ultimately his responsibility--and his apology shows him taking that responsibility--but he's got to be able to delegate decisions like this. It's not like he's going to personally test every feature. He's got other things to do. (He probably reviewed Maps, but by all accounts the issues with it aren't immediately obvious in the valley.)
His real responsibility is to hire people who can make solid decisions on his behalf, and to fire or move them if they can't do so.
When you reach a certain level, you have to stop passing the buck. Hell, if you want to reach that level, you have to stop passing the buck. Maps was Forstall's responsibility--to ship well or sound the alarm. Unless you have evidence that he was overruled, he's the right person to take the fall.
(This is setting aside all the personality politics, which likely played a bigger role in Forstall's exit. But that aside, Maps was still Forstall's job.)
No Forstall was forced to resign because of a lot of mistakes under his watch and a lot of bad blood between him and key people like Ive and Mansfield. With Samsung emphasising the design aspect in the Samsung S3/Note it is critical that Apple have a cohesive end to end experience. And that requires communication.
I think the letter was just the tip of a planet sized iceberg.
Oh, the Steve Jobs argument again. The omnipresent Steve Jobs, with his golden fingers and eagle eyes.
The same Steve Jobs that launched Mobile Me. The same Jobs that launched Ping as the next big social idea. The same Steve Jobs that allowed iPhone 3G to be upgraded to iOS 4 and become an expensive electronic brick.
Every CEO knows the worst thing you could do is to micromanage your team. And while every now and then you do have to step in, look over the shoulder and do course correction, even Steve Jobs knew he should spend time on the big things than to second guess every little decision of his team. And Tim Cook has a dream team, probably the best in the industry.
Yes, they will screw up eventually - as they did with maps, as they did before during Jobs era, and will certainly do it again in the future. When that happens, you take full responsibility (like Tim Cook did), make the changes internally (which may or may not mean changing people), and make them clean up the mess.
Certainly the Maps brouhaha somewhat impacted Scott Forstall, but I doubt anybody in their conscious mind would fire the most experienced sw guy in the company (and arguably in the industry) just because ONE mistake on a by-product feature. People simply don't buy an iPhone because of the Maps. And there's 200 other apps, some much better than the Google/Apple Maps anyway.
It's a well known fact that Forstall was a divisive guy. Love him or hate him. And over time people get tired of managing conflicts. It was time for a change. And as of this guy in charge of maps.. well, he f'ed-up. As Steve Jobs once said, "When you're the janitor, reasons matter". Sadly for this guy, he wasn't the janitor anymore.
They may have committed to launching Maps with iOS 6 early on, and been so pissed off at Google that they burned their bridge (that is, their iOS 6 branch which retained Google's maps). So in that case, the choice in front of Cook would've been a) launch iPhone 5 with shoddy maps and iOS 6 or b) launch iPhone 5 with iOS 5, or possibly c) don't launch iPhone 5 and watch the stock price crater.
Thing is, there wasn't much interesting meat on the iPhone 5 release, so I'm sure they were scrambling for any sort of "feature" to pad out the release.