His main suggestion is that Apple couldn't get enough data to make it good without launching the app, and they had to go ahead and release it at some point. The software works quite well - it's the dataset that's inferior.
Apple could have rolled out their map-app gradually to a few hundred thousand "specially selected" beta users before totally dropping Google Maps in iOS. Given Apple's religious following - many users would have probably paid to participate. It was unnecessarily risky and basically a product-management-screwup to force-convert everyone simultaneously.
They did that in the iOS 6 beta, the users were known as developers. And yes, we do pay $99/year to be able to test things like this. The forums there listed the same things people here are complaining about. It was all said on those forums, we were just under NDA not to talk about it.
Which leads me to believe this was an upper management push and they are willing to deal with the PR fallout. beta 1 maps was really really bad, gm is workable. It has improved a ton during the betas, and that was a 2 month-ish spread. I'll give Apple a few months to clean up the data, it makes Core Location way more useful than when it was tied to Googles' api. Note this is for things like the vector road parts of the map, you can basically have your location clamped to the road. Sometimes gps signals are... erratic when driving in cities, this helps things out immensely. But we'll see if it is another ping or not.
Apple's been keeping logs of iPhone users' positions for ages. And they could have just sucked data out of user behaviors of the existing mapping solution if they needed something in a map context.
It's not position data that Apple needs, it's bug reports. Regardless of how much work you put into map data, at some point the only way to know if it's correct or not is to go there and see what things look like on the ground. Crowd sourcing is the only way to get to the quality level of Google Maps.
But, that basically means that Apple has drastically regressed the user experience in order to force users to help them build a product so that one day it might be able to compete with the product that they were already using for years, and suffer through cruddy data in the meantime. And they expected people to be okay with this?
Google is so far ahead on mapping that I doubt Apple will ever catch up. You're talking about volunteer crowdsourced data versus a company that literally has a fleet of cars and employees out scouring the world and mapping it in detail. Unless Apple decides to make a major play in mapping - not just in iOS, but in building a first-class mapping product to compete with Google Maps - I doubt that they're ever going to have data that'll match peoples' friends' Android-based mapping experiences, and that's going to leave a lot of people very sour on what is supposed to be the premium-brand smartphone.
I have a number of friends and acquaintences who have either already switched or are soon switching from their iPhone 4 to some Android-flavored phone specifically because they're so disappointed with the iPhone 5 + iOS6 combination, and no longer feel like it's the best option on the market. Pissing people off and losing them as customers is a pretty terrible price to pay for wanting to gather bug reports on location data.
"Google is so far ahead on mapping that I doubt Apple will ever catch up. "
We're not talking rocket science here. If Apple wants to catch up to Google on mapping, they just have to invest time, money, and attention. We're talking at most two years for Apple to get where Google is today.
...at which point Google will be two years ahead of them. Mapping is Google's wheelhouse; it's an afterthought for Apple. I wouldn't bet on the hardware company ever beating the data company at mapping. Apple would have to become a fundamentally different company to seriously challenge Google's mapping offering.
I'm not making any claims about Apple catching up to "searching" - That truly is a field in which google has demonstrated they have unique, and proprietary advantages over the competition. They have deep research and superior search algorithms, and I would say only Bing can give them competition, and I don't believe Apple will ever be able to provide similar capability when it it comes to that.
But the elements of mapping that are not related to search, that is, routing, displaying tiles, walking directions, cycling directions, turn-by-turn, aerial-view, points of interests - these are all elements that internet data is less useful, and where being able to invest billions of dollars in acquiring suitable cartographic information (as Nokia did) should be sufficient to put together a world class map environment for the customer. My perspective on the challenges is mostly informed through several hours of reading historic postings here: http://blog.telemapics.com/?p=399
In all likelihood, after several billions of dollars invested, Apple 2014 will equal Google 2012 in the areas I just described (mapping sans search).
Think of web pages with POI data (store and restaurant locators are probably the tip of that iceberg), a long history of location-related searches including data from "front door" web searches, data on how the results of those searches were used (which Google uses to great effect in other places) and so on.
No they couldn't have. The "logs of iPhone users' positions" you refer to were stored on the device and never sent to Apple. It's highly unlikely they could have ever been sent to Apple anyway both from a legal perspective and a PR perspective (considering what a mess it was when they didn't send logs off users's phones).
They could have rolled it out as a standalone app first, with the clear goal being that they want users to try it out and report issues. There's no reason the first version had to replace the google-backed one.
I'm sure there'd be thousands of people willing to give it a go, and people would be much more forgiving of errors if it wasn't the only option.
They could've tried licensing far better map data from Navteq/Nokia like Amazon recently did for the Kindles by using some of their 100 billion dollar stash. Amazon did not try to roll out its own maps with half baked data. Whether Nokia would have been willing to license to Apple is a different question.
I think Apple doesn't really care at this point where the iPhone is essentially a cash cow five years after launch with 600K apps in the app store. Incremental improvements are enough to sell millions on launch and later with many people guaranteed to buy it regardless of how many flaws it has.