[ghshephard]

"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.

[cheald]

...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.

[brianobush]

Google has far more data to enhance its maps. Does Apple have the internet lying around to analyze?

[ghshephard]

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).

[fpgeek]

Very, very true.

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.