[wisty]

(No internal knowledge)

I'm surprised he got fired over maps. Mapping is hard - comparable to writing a search engine. Apple did as well as can be expected for a first attempt. They had some kind of problem with Google Maps, and wanted to build their own capability, which was never going to be easy.

He might have been fired if he cheated, by creating a well curated Valley dataset to prove to the other execs what a great job he'd done. That would annoy people.

I've heard rumors that he was seen as "better managing up than down" (impressing his boss, at the expense of results), and that doesn't strike me as something Tim Cook would like very much (both from his reported management style, and the number of stock options he has). I can see that being a last straw from Tim - "You screwed up, now own up to it. Or else."

[mbreese]

If he did get fired over maps, it wasn't because mapping is hard, or that the app didn't deliver.

It would be because he over promised and under delivered.

Sure, it was embarrassing to Apple to release a half-assed Maps app, but even more so to tout it just a few weeks earlier as being soooo good.

[masklinn]

> It would be because he over promised and under delivered.

And alledgedly refused to own up to it.

[VikingCoder]

Are you certain of that, or is it speculation?

Was he pushed to do Maps, and he told everyone it was going to be a nightmare, and then made the best of a bad situation?

[bonzoesc]

> I'm surprised he got fired over maps. Mapping is hard - comparable to writing a search engine. Apple did as well as can be expected for a first attempt.

The problem is that they released that first attempt. iPhone and iPad weren't their first attempts at phones and tablet computers, they were simply the first ones good enough to take to market.

[brianpan]

There are ways of dealing with hard problems- managing scope, managing expectations. I'm not too surprised he was fired for not executing. Remember Papermaster and the antenna?

http://daringfireball.net/2010/08/papermaster_damn_antenna

[taligent]

Exactly. Why do you think the AppleTV is called a 'hobby' ?

[Firehed]

Off topic, but I really want one of my "hobbies" to be a half-a-billion dollar business.

[gfosco]

Mapping is very hard, and he shipped it before it was ready. That was a pretty bad event for them; caused lot of negativity from users. I'm not surprised.

[crag]

I learned a long time ago honesty and taking ownership is the best policy.

It possible that he though he did no wrong. Or maybe he thought he was above the fray. But if he wanted to save his job, owning the wrong is the best way. People forgive when the apology is genuine.

[spinchange]

While it hasn't seemed to have an appreciable affect on sales or the stock price, the shortcomings of the new Maps have been an embarrassing PR mess for Apple and a hit to its reputation for uncompromising quality that sets it so far apart from everyone else.

It does not surprise that he's being fired for this or that his departure is going to be transitional since he's so intricately involved with so many central aspects and initiatives at the company.

(also no internal knowledge)

[taligent]

Mapping is NOT hard. I know from personal experience.

The reason Apple screwed up maps is because of one reason and one reason only. Licensing. The app itself is great. The 3D maps are great. The data is the problem.

Apple chose not to license data from many of the key players they should have to at least be competitive. My guess is Apple arrogantly thought they could get enough feedback from users to fix up the problem themselves.

[CamperBob2]

Mapping is NOT hard. I know from personal experience.

What map applications have you authored? Any links?

[wisty]

A basic map application just requires data, projections (which is a solved problem, if a little tedious), and a rendering system. Path finding is also basically solved (it's Algorithms 101, though you need something a bit more sophisticated to make it scale). A basic mapping app can be hacked up in a week. A good mapping app is obviously much harder, but it's still doable.

But like taligent said, it's data that's the real problem. Mapping data tends to be dirty and heterogeneous. Do you have a point, or a polygon? You're in trouble if you just have a street address (geocoding can be very hit and miss). Metadata (like the projection) can be missing. Locations can be slightly wrong, and you'll draw a highway running through a shopping mall, or connect streets which don't quite connect, or have gaps in a street because it changes street names and there's a tiny gap between the two streets (which doesn't exist in the real world). How do you normalise the field names? How do you even get the data? Once you've got everything into your database, you move onto the next city / state / country.

[zaphar]

Lets see if I understand you right. Mapping is not hard. You just have to get good data. Getting good data is hard though. And getting good data is part of doing Mapping. So basically you said Mapping wasn't hard and then said that a crucial part of Mapping was really hard.

All of which is a roundabout way of contradicting? yourself.

[taligent]

This answers my point better. The fact is that many of these mapping companies that even Google still licenses to this day have been driving around countries in some cases for decades.

That is the real hard part. Trying to obtain all that data. Because every mistake is potentially one person complaining loudly on the internet.

[veidr]

OK, but that's like saying, "Defeating the aliens is NOT hard... The biological vulnerabilities of human DNA are the problem... you just have to be impervious to ionizing radiation."

Much like machine translation and teledildonics, once you start to try to scale globally, mapping is actually one of the hardest problems that is remotely viable at our current technological level. There's a tiny handful of companies that can do a barely usable job, and everything else is worthless garbage.

In Japan, at least, Apple has gone from the former to the latter with iOS 6. (Maps.app did work great last week on a business trip to Austin, TX, however.)