A short week after releasing the iPhone 5, Apple’s CEO publicly apologizes for the Maps fiasco and the company’s website updates its description of the new service. As the digital inspirations blog found out, the unfortunately emphatic description that once read:
Designed by Apple from the ground up, Maps gives you turn-by-turn spoken directions, interactive 3D views, and the stunning Flyover feature. All of which may just make this app the most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever.
becomes more modest:
Designed by Apple from the ground up, Maps gives you turn-by-turn spoken directions, interactive 3D views, and the stunning Flyover feature. All in a beautiful vector-based interface that scales and zooms with ease.
In his letter of apology, Tim Cook also reminds everyone of alternatives to his company’s product, and of easy ways to access Google and Nokia maps:
While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.
And Consumer Reports, after trying the new Maps found that, warts and all, they weren’t too terrible:
Apple uses maps from TomTom, a leading navigation company. We suspect many criticisms pointing to the map quality are misguided, as we have found TomTom to provide quality maps and guidance across multiple platforms. Instead, the fault may be Apple’s software applied to the TomTom data. […]
Either way, in our experience thus far, this is a minor concern.
Bottom line:
Both the free Apple and Google navigation apps provide clear routing directions. Apple feels like a less-mature product. But as seen with the initial competing applications for the iPhone, we would expect updates to this new app over time–and Apple has promised as much. When getting down to the nitty gritty, Google provides a better overall package, but we feel that both provide a good solution for standard software. We expect the competition between the companies will benefit customers with ongoing improvements.
So… Normal teething problems, forgivable excess of enthusiasm from proud Apple execs, the whole media fireworks will blow over and everything will be soon forgotten — remember Antennagate?
One would hope so, especially if Apple’s Maps keep improving at a good pace.
But look at this graph:
Since the iPhone 5 release, and the Maps fracas, Apple shares lost about 4.5% of their value, that’s about $30B in market cap.
Fair or not, it’s hard not to fantasize about another course of events where, in advance, a less apologetic Tim Cook letter would have told Apple customers of the “aspiring” state of Apple Maps and encouraged them to keep alternatives and workarounds in mind. And where Apple’s website would have been modest from day one.
We’ll never know how Apple shares would have behaved, but they certainly wouldn’t have gone lower than they stand now — and Apple’s reputation as a forthright, thoughtful company would have been greatly enhanced.
This is more than piling on, or crying over spilled maps. We might want to think what this whole doing the right thing — only when caught — says about Apple’s senior management.
First, the technical side. Software always ships with fresh bugs, some known, some not. In this case, it’s hard to believe the Maps team didn’t know about some of the most annoying warts. Did someone or some ones deliberately underplay known problems? Or did the team not know. And if so, why? Too broad a net to cast and catch the bugs? Too much secrecy before the launch? (But Maps were demoed at the June WWDC.)
Second, the marketing organization. This is where messages are crafted, products are positioned, claims are wordsmithed. Just like engineers are leery of marketeers manhandling their precious creations, marketing people tend to take engineers’ claims of crystalline purity with, at best, polite cynicism. One is left to wonder how such a hot issue, Apple Maps vs. Google Maps, wasn’t handled with more care — before the blowup. And why, with inevitable comparisons between an infant product and a mature, world-class one, the marketing message was so lackadaisically bombastic.
And last, the CEO. Was trust in his team misplaced, abused? Were the kind of checks that make Apple’s supply chain work so well also applied to the Maps product, or was some ill side-effect of team spirit at play, preventing the much-needed bad news to reach the top?
We don’t need to know. But Apple execs do if they want the difficult birth of Apple Maps to be written in history as a wake-up call that put the top team back on track. I don’t want to think about the alternative.
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22 Comments
I think the root cause of this problem is the disconnect between the marketing (hyping) of Maps as the marque feature of iOS6 and the ‘swiss cheese’ reality – the Maps app is pretty good but there are holes in the data and…
If Apple has said more or less the same thing about Maps as they did about Siri (i.e. its a beta/first release and we need crowdsourcing to make it better) and had it as another feature amongst many then the shock of reality for the punters would have been much less.
That’s the longer term problem. Marketing on this occasion has run ahead of engineering (notwithstanding that there may be engineering problems as well).
Wonder how Scott Forstall is feeling about all this – its his baby after all…
I think the more likely reason for the drop is the over exuberant projections by analysts that Apple would sell approximately 8 million phones over the weekend, when in fact they sold 5 million.
From a comparison by Consumer Reports “Both the free Apple and Google navigation apps provide clear routing directions. Apple feels like a less-mature product. But as seen with the initial competing applications for the iPhone, we would expect updates to this new app over time–and Apple has promised as much.” I thinks the negative comments about the Apple maps app are magnified just like the so called antennagate episode. Now with the Apple Maps app I have turn by turn voice navigation and no longer have to look at my phone while driving. You can also consider the drop to be profit taking since Apple had recently just reached its highest valuation ever. They were ready to sell on the slightest hint of bad news and not selling 8 million was it.
Jean,
This is as poorly written as Apple’s new Maps.
$AAPL didn’t drop 4.5% just because of mapgate issue. The following reasons had more to do with the drop than what you claim.
1. iPhone’s release weekend sales numbers didnot meet the ridiculous estimates of overpaid WallStreet jokers.
2. The markets themselves were in decline due to resurfaced problems in Europe – Greece and Spain. Apple’s stock is not immune to systemic risk.
3. Apple’s supply chain wasn’t beefed up as expected to meet the demand and release in multiple countries last Friday. Few suppliers such as Sharp had production issues and didn’t supply the screens as expected to Foxconn.
4. There was a riot at a Foxconn plant which halted production.
Maps gate was just one reason ong many for the drop.
The principles on which its based are sound.
Apple now is proposing what it consider good challengers (to Google in particular).
Again Apple is doing the correct way, even when it misstep.
the stock drop had little to do with maps. more likely the result of “below expectations” first-weekend iPhone5 sales.
@ GadgetFunkie and others: You’re right, the weakness in my post hoc proper hoc $30B argument is plain to see. There are many competing post facto explanations for the $30B drop. For comps, I check what happened after the antennagate fracas: nothing, the stock kept climbing.
I find it interesting when people can read the minds of investors and divine why stocks go up or down over the period of a few days. AAPL is traded millions of times a day by people around the world only rarely can we tie a price change to a specific event. When Steve gave keynotes you could watch the price ticker and just about an hour of so into the talk AAPL would go up or down as investors were pleased or disappointed.
Looking back over the past year you’ll see that 5% is not an unusual move for AAPL.
Always love your post, but this time, THUMB DOWN. Please turn the Maps drama light off. There is more important/interesting issues in the [IT] world right now. Are Apple users drama queens because they are so used to “perfection”? Disappointing.
“We’ll never know how Apple shares would have behaved, but they certainly wouldn’t have gone lower than they stand now — and Apple’s reputation as a forthright, thoughtful company would have been greatly enhanced.”
Damn, I wish I had known that!! You are a magnificiant forecaster. Oh wait, you said this after the stock went down. Oh, never mind.
If you think you can connect the dots this simplisticly, please do so BEFORE there are any dots OR if you want to be a Monday morning quarterback, please put all the dots on the page and then let’s see if you can make sense of a pattern.
Rubbish headline, rubbish article.
Mr. Gassée presents a pretty sober view of the maps debacle and attempts to quantify the damage, an obviously difficult thing to do. However, there is a meme in the industry that this is good for Apple: maps aren’t that bad and will be fixed soon and Google is gone and paying a very dear price for it. This situation has been a great promo for Google services; they are ubiquitous and they work. Apple alternatively continues to pursue internet services like a trip to the dentist. The iPhone business is a hit a business, every year people get to decide to buy or not. The eco-system is the glue that makes that a harder decision and Apple’s commitment is strong on the lockin side but week on quality and ubiquity. Brand strength has been the key to stability thus far, but given trends, lack of a serious commitment to the services is a big problem.
Maps? Really?
Clearly the market was reacting to the imminent death of Ping.
I don’t know much about GIS, but I was under the impression that the “relatively” lower quality of Apple Maps compared to Google was due to poor data. However, It would seem that it is more a problem of poor software. In that case, Apple has not so much a Maps problem but rather a “Search” problem.
Whether it is Maps, iTunes or the App store, Apple is still struggling to offer its customer efficient tools for searching/browsing large volume of information.
I wouldn’t be surprised that they get closer from Yahoo or DuckDuckGo.
Either the Apple testing & development team and the executives are too lazy these days OR they are too demotivated to do their job. It’s also possible that the team, kind of, given up to Android’s success. This is terrible. The marketing/Tech team didn’t bother to call the map as “Beta”. I really wonder if Cook, Forstall pr Schiller have played with the map app for an hour. How can they call it most beautiful, powerful,….etc?
But is it really all about the maps? Has Apple this time actually brought the right innovations at the right time? I would suggest probably not.
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It can help to think about Apple versus the rest in terms of chess pieces. Apple moves, most of the time, like the Knight. It’s able to leap over apparent obstacles with ease, but its field of operations is limited. Mobile phones no good? Boom – touchscreen, no keypad. Battery life a problem? Boom – custom chipset. Small screen a problem? Boom – retina display. Others (e.g. Samsung) move more like the Bishop, unable to leap over obstacles, but controlling a larger area. So, multiple screen sizes, removable batteries, and the use of others’ innovations.
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Apple effectively had to choose between improving the base iOS (which badly needs it) or increasing screen size to match moves by the opposition. I think the real problem is that they panicked just a little, and chose the wrong option. They should have stuck with the old screen size, and worked instead on iOS. Again, this is partly a result of the need to make careful Knight moves: they weren’t so much worried about the market today, as the developing market in 2013.
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I’m not saying the new screen size is “bad” – in the long term, it is probably a good move. But Apple partly misread the market priorities. They urgently need to scrap the skeuomorphism, migrate iOS out of its C-based reliance and more into Obj-C, and redesign all of the base apps — mail, contacts, calendar. To begin with. The problem is that Apple has not given itself the kind of software leadership it needs.With all respect to the incumbent, they don’t have anyone the equal of Bertrand Serlet. And Tim Cook desperately needs someone of stature in software, as it is the part of the business he understands the least.
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(I wonder what M. Gassée’s plans are for the future?)
People love to second guess Apple, but it’s clear that mapping is strategic to them, that the ‘mapocolypse’ is overblown and that this was a painful step that they had to make NOW. Apple is a mobile device company and location-based services and search are core competencies that they have to own.
While tech pundits are worrying about the Eiffel Tower being a pancake, Apple can’t keep up with demand for the iPhone 5. And the divorce went through, and all Google got out of it was Siri and Maps.
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There will be something like this for every iPhone launch. It used to be the lack of FlashPlayer. Reviewers and competitors need one thing to harp on. The users don’t care because they have no choices. Apple is the only one that makes a PC in an iPod form factor. Other devices are just phones with some bolt-on Java applets.
Antennagate was also BS. As soon as Jobs showed a 1% return rate and 0.4% AppleCare calls, nobody should have even said “Antennagate” ever again. That same phone sold 100 million units and still sells today.
I once asked Google Maps for directions from Oakland to San Francisco and it told me to walk on water across the SF Bay. I have had Google Maps redirect me to sponsored links. Mapping is still in its early days.
> “Fair or not, it’s hard not to fantasize about another course of events”
I don’t think it is hard to imagine what would happen if Apple warned users ahead of the time that there would be bugs in a 1.0 version of an app. The skewering would just start earlier and last longer with such headlines as “how bad is it going to be?” from bloggers who has not touched the new Maps app, just like the bloggers who has not yet used it harping about it during the release week.
Right now, much of the actual hands-on reviews lament the loss of StreetView and the integrated transit directions. Guess what, they were known months beforehand. Did that make the apps any more user friendly or did it prevent bloggers from bringing them up as major drawbacks? What makes you think things would turn out differently if Apple warned about bugs in 3D rendering of some buildings and bridges or less extensive POIs or missing train stations in some cities?
Let’s call a spade a spade.
Save for turn-by-turn, the rest of Apple Maps is crappy.
My own take is that Apple misunderstood what the app was used for. They thought people wanted it to have drive indications (an american bias ?) – and indeed it was an improvement – , whereas most of the case, and especially in towns, they want some geographic information about a specific place – and there it was a fiasco.
On top of the fact that the weaknesses were known to some extent and considered to be gullible in the view of the strengthes.
So all in all, it is a bad signal, because it shows bad customer insight, a domain where apple is normally at the top
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7 Trackbacks
[...] Jean-Louis Gassée also has questions about how Apple let this happen, and get so out of hand: In this case, it’s hard to believe the Maps team didn’t know about some of the most annoying warts. Did someone or some ones deliberately underplay known problems? Or did the team not know. And if so, why? [...]
[...] This article from The Monday Note reports that the maps fiasco has so far sliced $30 billion off the value of Apple. I say so far, because there is NO WAY that Apple can recover from this mess until Google maps is restored on iOS6. If they don’t do this, 2012 will be the year the balance tipped and history will write it as exact moment that Apple Jumped the Shark. [...]
[...] the Maps thing is still happening. In this week’s Monday note, Jean-Louis Gassée makes the case that most of the $30 billion or 4.5-percent of Apple’s [...]
[...] the Maps thing is still happening. In this week’s Monday note, Jean-Louis Gassée makes the case that most of the $30 billion or 4.5-percent of Apple’s [...]
[...] the Maps thing is still happening. In this week’s Monday note, Jean-Louis Gassée makes the case that most of the $30 billion or 4.5-percent of Apple’s [...]
[...] value after the “Maps fracas” and subsequent apology to customers by Chief Executive Tim Cook. Read more on Gassée’s blog. [...]
[...] The decline began shortly after Apple’s /quotes/zigman/68270/quotes/nls/aapl AAPL -3.31% new Maps app started to get panned by reviewers following the launch of the iPhone 5 on Sept. 21. Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive and venture capitalist, wrote in his blog barely a week later that the company lost nearly $30 billion in market value after the “Maps fracas” and subsequent apology to customers by Chief Executive Tim Cook. Read more on Gassée’s blog. [...]