Seems like a good old fashioned scapegoating. The problem with Apple Maps is entirely at the marketing and corporate decision making level.
I was an employee at Vicinity Corp (the first provider of Yahoo Maps back in the olden days) and can tell you from experience that good mapping software (and accumulation of good map data) is an extremely difficult problem.
Apple Maps is actually quite decent if you view it as a 1.0 product. Anyone expecting it to be truly competitive with Google Maps on the first go needs to reread Joel Spolsky's old essay on the 10 year rule for good software.
The failure of Apple Maps is that the execs made the decision to replace a superior product with it while simultaneously messaging that the new software was actually superior to the old one, when it clearly wasn't.
While I know nothing of the real story behind this, I suspect the guy who was let go here wasn't the guy who made the actual bad decisions.
> I was an employee at Vicinity Corp (the first provider of Yahoo Maps back in the olden days)
I don't know if by "olden days" you mean 2005-2006 or so, but I can tell you that at that time Yahoo Maps was the only serious competitor for Google Maps. It had actually better data than Google for many big cities outside of the US.
For example only in the last 6 months or so did I see that GMaps actually had geo-data for my city's neighborhoods (their "boundaries" etc.), a thing that was available in Yahoo Maps back in those days. Plus, the Yahoo data was quite open, unlike the walled garden that is Google Maps.
More olden than that, I'm afraid. I was at Vicinity in 1996 and 1997.
By 2005 Yahoo Maps wasn't using Vicinity anymore, they had their own in-house mapping team starting in 2002 or so. Between these two periods they also used MapQuest (which was Vicinity's main rival back then) for a bit.
By the time Google Maps became a thing what was left of Vicinity was owned by Microsoft (the old www.mapblast.com URL currently redirects to bing maps).
Agreed, Apple Maps are pretty much 7-8 years behind Google Maps. Money can't solve their problem. They need to do so much:
1) Build and train huge team to update the maps, stitch imagery, correct mistakes
2) Build tools for that team
3) Either buy the cutting-edge data, license it, or build it themselves. I don't see a point of licensing, since they might as well have used Google Maps.
4) Build the website. A maps app without a web interface is a lot less useful. They are basically sending their desktop users to their competitor.
5) Rebuild the brand. Right now Apple Maps is a joke, it's synonymous with bad directions. Nobody takes it seriously.
1? 2? I'm pretty sure a Maps team does exist, otherwise yknow... We wouldn't have a product. Software doesn't magically appear out of thin air. And data is being updated, so they clearly have both a team and tools to do it.
3 -> It's licensed from TomTom. Why don't you see a point to licensing? That's by far the best way to get cutting edge data. Getting it yourself is going to take years.
4 -> Apple Maps is rumoured to be in the latest 10.9 builds.
Better yet, encourage openness by funding/using OpenStreetMaps and strengthening their dataset. Nobody wins if Google/Nokia end up being the only owners of accurate map data.
I was an employee at Vicinity Corp (the first provider of Yahoo Maps back in the olden days) and can tell you from experience that good mapping software (and accumulation of good map data) is an extremely difficult problem.
Apple Maps is actually quite decent if you view it as a 1.0 product. Anyone expecting it to be truly competitive with Google Maps on the first go needs to reread Joel Spolsky's old essay on the 10 year rule for good software.
The failure of Apple Maps is that the execs made the decision to replace a superior product with it while simultaneously messaging that the new software was actually superior to the old one, when it clearly wasn't.
While I know nothing of the real story behind this, I suspect the guy who was let go here wasn't the guy who made the actual bad decisions.