[nivloc]

Maps are hard.

The original Google Maps was pretty bad. Mapquest beat it much of the time. There was one road in my hometown, and none in many countries.

Google devoted enormous resources to acquiring data (petabytes worth), processing it, correcting it, to give us the product we have today.

Even though Apple acquired some neat companies that made data look good, they obviously underestimated how much data was required to make it useful. No amount of QC could have prepared them, frankly.

The upside is that Google has been fairly closed with their map products. They're miles ahead of Apple, who will need every partner they can find to close the gap. Hopefully it will give the data providers a bit of leverage to get refinements back out so it can be used in endeavours other than showing where the nearest pizza joint is.