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Apple Axes Head of Mapping Team
New submitter drkim writes "'Apple has reportedly fired the head of its mapping team following software glitches which annoyed customers and rained mockery on the company.' Mr. Williamson promptly left Apple headquarters in Antarctica, and walked to his home in Middelfart, Denmark."
Nerval's Lobster adds: "Cue is also 'seeking advice from outside map-technology experts' as well as 'prodding maps provider TomTom to fix landmark and navigation data it shares with Apple.'"
Was this guy setup for failure by having to meeting google map standards overnight?
Firing people sometimes is an escape goat for companies mistakes.
The executive failed to deliver the impossible: a complete mapping system built from the ground up in a year or so. The result is that he gets sacked.
The solution: Apple needs to stop picking fights. I'm sure Google would have given them the full turn-by-turn system if Apple would have paid for it. Apple has great hardware and software engineers. But they aren't good enough to replicate the technology its competitor has spent over a decade developing in just one year.
"Mr. Williamson promptly left Apple headquarters in Antarctica, and walked to his home in Middelfart, Denmark."
That's impossible. Apple maps says Middelfart is south of Antarctica. Sheesh.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
Personally I still like the new maps app. Even on my old iphone4 it's faster and easier to read and does everything I want. It's even got more features than the previous map app.
Then again, I live in California and don't suffer from the bad map issues that other regions have had.
Let's hope apple learns from this lesson. Old Jobs hasn't been in the ground long and already their first "convenience over QC" choice has come back to bite them. Jobs was a QC /fanatic/ and would not have let the shitty maps slip out (Or stay there for long) even if staying with google was a thorn in their side.
And it was a thorn. Google is a competitor now. Google also wanted better terms if apple wanted to add new mapping features. Apple decided that it was not worth it.. And they were wrong.
I think if Jobs was still here he'd have slapped people around, re-negotiated with Google, and quickly have a patch issued to revert the maps. We'll see if apple continues to stumble in this very un-apple like manner.
With any luck google will issue a new maps app and everyone will be happy.
Some people tried to take a photo with their iPhone 5 of him leaving Apple headquarters but there was a huge purple flare over most of it so you can't even tell who it is. They must have been holding it wrong or the sun in that part of the US actually is purple.
I was a frequent user of MapQuest when Google Maps appeared and for a good while there were glitches with Google Maps just like Apple is experiencing so I stuck with MapQuest. Google Maps are only as good as they are now because of all the time invested but even now they get it wrong. I was visiting a friend in Alabama and Google put his street address two miles away from the actual location.
The major loss with Apple Maps is the lack of public transport directions and for that reason alone, Google Maps needs to return. Until then, my phone is staying on iOS 5.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
It would have been wiser to let it mature a bit more like Google did.
Huh? Google maps was full of errors and omissions when it came out. It improved over the years.
In a moment of seriousness, he was fired BECAUSE Apple Maps are providing faulty and at times outright insane directions. He was the guy in charge of making Apple Maps, as the summary says.
So the joke is that he used his iPhone to navigate home to Middelfart from Antarctica, and obviously was told the distance was short enough that he could just walk.
FYI, they're about 10,000 miles apart.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
The problem wasn't so much that the Apple maps were terrible. With a few notable exceptions it actually wasn't bad for a first attempt. Remember, Google Maps wasn't very good at first either. The problem was promoting the Apple Maps as this awesome, fantastic piece of software. Someone in the Apple management chain needed to say "Uh Tim, maybe we should dial back the excitement a bit on this maps thing. Have you seen it? It needs work.". Evidently nobody did so Cook rolled it out thinking it was great and it wasn't.
Cook looks like an idiot, and by extension so does Apple, so something had to be done about it. He can't allow that to happen. If they lie to him about Maps then how can he trust them to tell him the truth about the next product? If I were him I would have done exactly the same thing. He needs to send a message to management that this sort of thing won't be tolerated. If the product is not ready then fine, we'll figure out something but don't bullshit me and leave me hanging out to dry in front our customers. It might seem harsh but these people are getting paid a ton of money to make the right decisions. If you screw up you're gone.
Anybody thinking Tim Cook should remain CEO of Apple needs their head read.
I think that is wasn't the man in charge of Maps that should have gotten the ax, but the guy that decided to drop a working product in favor of a broken product and then stood on a stage and claimed it was better then all the rest.
I know the decision to drop Google Maps all began with Steve Jobs, however after his passing and Tim Cook taking over certainly there should have been some review of the companies projects to determine if Apple should stay on the same course. At some point I am sure someone must have fired up the Maps app and realized it was no-where near ready for prime-time.
If Tim Cook is going to blindly follow in Jobs footsteps and not make any executive decision that didn't originate from something Jobs began then I think he should step down or be ousted. Any sane CEO should have yanked the Maps product from the iOS 6 release schedule for lacking to match the quality of the app it was replacing. Yes, maybe it would have looked like egg on his face for postponing a highly publicized new feature, but it would have been far less worse then issuing an apology for releasing the app in the first place.
And what the f*ck about iTunes 11? There is only 2 days left in November and Apple still proudly boasts it is coming in November. Just like they proudly boasted it was coming in October. I think iTunes 11 is another fiasco in the making.
You can't just keep firing your top exec's without realizing that that man at top needs to start taking responsibility for the state of the company he is supposedly running. Apple doesn't need a caretaker, it needs a leader, Cook is not a leader.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Option D: They could have straight forward have bought Tom Tom and use their application. TomTom's own devices that use the same map information had no trouble navigating where Apple was leading you nowhere. At the current share price it would be affordable for Apple to buy it and it would buy them an entrance into the dashboard of several large brands, that are already using built-in TomTom navigation devices.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
They let hatered of Google get in the way of day-to-day business here.
Actually the opposite is true. They let reliance on Google go on for too long, using it as a crutch that hurt day-to-day business for years.
Android had built-in turn by turn for years; not only could Apple not provide it in iOS, but developers could not write apps that provided turn-by-turn directions on top of the built in iOS mapping framework (it was against Google's TOS). So the whole platform was limited for years by Google restrictions on not just what Apple could do, but what any developer could do.
Now that Google is out of the picture iOS users have turn by turn directions. They have vector maps. iOS developers can do whatever they want with the built in mapping framework now, without arbitrary Google limitations like limits on reverse geocoding per day, or having to avoid covering up the Google logo on the map, or (as stated) being able to show turn by turn directions on a map.
Apple should have ditched Google maps much earlier before it got more painful for more users. But the fact is they had to do so, and at least now that it is done Apple can clean up the map data (the hardest part of mapping) and within a year should be essentially caught up for most areas. Already they have better satellite data in many areas than Google does, and they work better in China/Japan for native users (not as well for english users).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't recall too many high profile firings during Steve Jobs tenure
You mean like Mark Papermaster over the iPhone 4 antenna issues? Or the Mobile Me team lead?
Oh.
Has everyone here got some kind of amnesia? Because Jobs stories are rife with him firing people that displeased him. The current firings seem quite mild by comparison.
Oddly people now seem to think Apple under Steve Jobs was some kind of perfect mecca of products without issues and never an employee fired. That was never the case, but Apple Haters sure like to claim it was.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Leviticus is a complete mishmash of prohibitions, but at least some of them are believed to be simply banning the practices of non-Jahwist religions, and others are deeply rooted in the concept of women as property which still applies in the more backward parts of the Middle East. It's about as realistic as telling us that the Orpheus myth is a warning about the dire consequences of eating food in basement restaurants.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Because they do NOTHING to help users. You know, the poor bastards that actually have to use the maps? How does it help to hide more map data under a bigger logo? How does it help to push a location based social media system no-one uses through the official maps app?
No-one has entitled you to speak for all the users. I am a heavy Latitude user. If I still owned an Apple device, I'd use Latitude with Maps if it was available there.
Besides, the whole "doesn't help the users" argument as it pertains to iOS Maps debacle is completely inane, since switching to obviously inferior-quality data not only did nothing to help the users, it did a lot to hurt them - hence all the vocal backlash from the userbase that is trivial to find online. And what, exactly, the users get in return? A pretty but ultimately mostly useless ability to see 3D buildings in satellite mode, and?..