Apple needs to take their massive $$$ warchest and spend an inordinate amount of money on getting maps back up in shape. Each of those $'s is worth it. It's an absolutely crucial feature and it needs to be not just good enough, it needs to be really good and better than most.
My fear is now Apple is becoming more bean counter and less passion, strong-opinion driven. To let Maps out in this shape is a troubling misstep.
That falls afoul of Brooks' law though. Apple isn't limited by development cash in any meaningful way. They're limited by staff. There aren't that many world class developers out there. Apple is grabbing up all they can, but they're in competition with a lot of other companies with sizable war chests. And the ones Apple has are hard at work already.
Google's been throwing world class talent at maps for the better part of a decade now. And it's only now, within the last year or so, that the product has even begun to look mature enough to be cloned. Basically, Apple can't buy this. They just have to work on it iteratively until it improves.
Which, IMHO, it will. The "innovative window" for maps has closed. There aren't enough great features left for Google to add, so they won't be able to maintain their lead indefinitely. Mapping will be a commodity app (and hopefully an open source one) within a few years.
> Apple is grabbing up all they can, but they're in competition with a lot of other companies with sizable war chests.
Why not start a price war for developers? Presumably Apple has plenty of funds to start offering developers, say, double what they're offering now. If developer skill and/or quality is really a primary concern for Apple, what is stopping them from simply offering more compensation? (Obviously, I'm not suggesting that this would be a quick fix to their maps project.)
Yes, I meant the data improvement. Pay people to get all major metros internationally double-checked and corrected. Pay for POI data entry or develop that separately.
I think Amazon one-upped Apple on the maps front by licensing Navteq's maps (now owned by Nokia) for the Kindle tablets and wrapping a nice API around them for developers.
Navteq's maps are way better than TomTom's. One of my friends had a TomTom GPS a few years ago and it was terrible, like once taking us around in circles for a restaurant and showing it was three miles away, when we could see it across the street a few hundred feet away. He had such bad experiences with it that he would borrow our Garmins and finally switched to Garmin a year ago. I just assumed that TomTom was Europe based so had much better coverage there and pretty horrible maps in the US.
If I were Google, I would release a very polished maps app for iOS for $10 with ads, but they might be just content with some people picking Android phones just because the builtin maps experience and turn by turn voice directions is really good.
Comments
Apple needs to take their massive $$$ warchest and spend an inordinate amount of money on getting maps back up in shape. Each of those $'s is worth it. It's an absolutely crucial feature and it needs to be not just good enough, it needs to be really good and better than most.
My fear is now Apple is becoming more bean counter and less passion, strong-opinion driven. To let Maps out in this shape is a troubling misstep.
That falls afoul of Brooks' law though. Apple isn't limited by development cash in any meaningful way. They're limited by staff. There aren't that many world class developers out there. Apple is grabbing up all they can, but they're in competition with a lot of other companies with sizable war chests. And the ones Apple has are hard at work already.
Google's been throwing world class talent at maps for the better part of a decade now. And it's only now, within the last year or so, that the product has even begun to look mature enough to be cloned. Basically, Apple can't buy this. They just have to work on it iteratively until it improves.
Which, IMHO, it will. The "innovative window" for maps has closed. There aren't enough great features left for Google to add, so they won't be able to maintain their lead indefinitely. Mapping will be a commodity app (and hopefully an open source one) within a few years.
> Apple is grabbing up all they can, but they're in competition with a lot of other companies with sizable war chests.
Why not start a price war for developers? Presumably Apple has plenty of funds to start offering developers, say, double what they're offering now. If developer skill and/or quality is really a primary concern for Apple, what is stopping them from simply offering more compensation? (Obviously, I'm not suggesting that this would be a quick fix to their maps project.)
Apple Maps might need some code improvement, but what they really need is data improvement, and that can be bought.
Yes, I meant the data improvement. Pay people to get all major metros internationally double-checked and corrected. Pay for POI data entry or develop that separately.
I think Amazon one-upped Apple on the maps front by licensing Navteq's maps (now owned by Nokia) for the Kindle tablets and wrapping a nice API around them for developers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/amazon_google_map_bm...
Navteq's maps are way better than TomTom's. One of my friends had a TomTom GPS a few years ago and it was terrible, like once taking us around in circles for a restaurant and showing it was three miles away, when we could see it across the street a few hundred feet away. He had such bad experiences with it that he would borrow our Garmins and finally switched to Garmin a year ago. I just assumed that TomTom was Europe based so had much better coverage there and pretty horrible maps in the US.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/375415/how-satnav-maps-are-m...
If I were Google, I would release a very polished maps app for iOS for $10 with ads, but they might be just content with some people picking Android phones just because the builtin maps experience and turn by turn voice directions is really good.
My experience in the reverse and backs up your assumption: in the UK TomTom has MUCH better maps than my Garmin device.