

Apple posted 6 Maps developer jobs in the last 10 days (search maps) - hownottowrite
http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?Language=en&CountryId=3

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Steko
Well that train came down the tracks pretty quick. How on earth did they only
notice this 10 days ago? If they really wanted to stick it to Google why not
just pay Nokia or Bing or someone ahead of whoever they're using. Instead they
stuck it to their customers.

Full disclosure, maps where I live are fine. That doesn't help me when I
travel though.

~~~
CamperBob2
We saw the same thing with Antennagate. On Friday they held the press
conference where Jobs fell on his sword. On Monday they posted employment ads
for 8 EEs with antenna experience.

This is apparently how Apple says "Oops." Who's running the show over there,
Horsebolt McStabledoor?

(Actually those ads were posted a couple of weeks before the press conference,
but they went unremarked-upon until the explanation became obvious.)

~~~
jason_slack
You dont by chance have that special event to where I could get it do you? I
have wanted to re-watch it again for some time.

~~~
shinratdr
You want to watch Steve Jobs explain an antennae issue and offer everyone
cases again? Why?

~~~
CamperBob2
It's interesting to study how successful leaders, especially those with their
own personality cults, behave when things aren't going their way. Maybe he's
in a similar position at the moment and is looking for ideas.

~~~
jason_slack
Actually, it is for my 14-year old who really, really, really pays attention
to how Jobs and Cook speak when asked questions. They way they carefully
choose their words, but to us it seems really natural.

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Splines
The Apple Maps team must be under tremendous pressure. I wouldn't be surprised
if there's some dysfunction going on in there too, given the variations in
quality (e.g., if the 3D is so bad, why didn't they just cut it and introduce
it as a shiny update when it's ready?)

Someone at Apple is probably kicking themselves because they didn't start on
this initiative a few years earlier.

~~~
ajross
I don't know that I buy that. Development efforts have trouble all the time,
no doubt even inside Apple. The problem here isn't that maps was late, it's
that someone decided to pull the trigger and ship it when it wasn't ready.
That's not something that can be put on the development group.

Pulling out the dead guy card again: one generally would assume that Jobs
would have been using this thing and playing with it to be sure it was ready.
Did Cook? Or if not, whose job was it and why didn't it happen?

~~~
kkowalczyk
It seems that Apple painted itself into a corner here.

Apple releases a new iPhone every year and it comes with major-ish OS update.
They can't just not ship and wait until it's perfect - there's too much money
riding on this upgrade cycle.

At the same time, Apple dropped contract with Google way before iOS 6 was
ready.

Since delaying iPhone 5/iOS 6 combo was out of the question and they didn't
prepare for the plan B (i.e. shipping Google's maps) their only option was to
ship their maps regardless of how shitty they are.

~~~
eloisant
Can't they do like Google with Android, and release updates for their core
apps independently from the App Store?

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josephlord
Is the app actually a problem itself? It seems fast, slick and fairly clean to
me.

The data on the other hand is pretty terrible but the good thing is that can
be cleaned up server side. There is a lot of data to fix though so it will
take a considerable time.

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hadem
"The Maps application is used by millions of customers and it's the best
mapping program on any mobile platform."

Pretty bold to say "the best mapping program on any mobile platform".

~~~
spaghetti
I noticed that too. Some of the issues can be fixed over time. But how is
Apple going to match street view? Start their own fleet of cars driving around
the city? I just tried street view (iOS 5) on iPhone and iPad and it's really
awesome. So yeah claiming "the best mapping platform on any mobile platform"
is BS.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Remember this is a company with billions of dollars in the bank, and
collecting street imagery is a very parallelizable task.

Lets do some basic math. Lets say you pay a driver $10/hr to drive 8 hrs a day
at an average speed of 35mph in the city. That is about 250 miles covered per
driver, per day and $80. So you do that for 10 days and that is 2,500 miles
for $800.

Now you build 10,000 cars with street view like capabilities, call it $40,000
per car, perhaps you get a car maker to help you perhaps not. that is 400M$
for cars, and 10,000 drivers is $8M for 10 days and 250 million miles. You
haven't even spent close to a billion dollars and you've got street view like
imagery for every major city on the planet in 10 days. Run this program for a
year and you cover every road twice with your 10,000 drivers.

Its certainly doable by Apple if they choose to go that route.

~~~
rorrr
Your "basic math" fails on many levels.

1) "an average speed of 35mph in the city" is not going to happen. In
Manhattan that's 15 MPH. In midtown Manhattan it's 1.7 MPH. So 10 MPH on
average would be more realistic.

2) You forgot gas

3) You forgot tickets

4) You forgot car insurance

5) You forgot car maintenance

6) You forgot car accidents and the cost of replacement

7) You forgot tolls

8) You forgot lawsuit costs

9) You forgot parking costs (and time to drive from and to parking)

10) You forgot the costs of the hiring process (try hiring 10 drivers in 10
days)

11) You forgot the cost of routing of all these cars (you have to organize
10,000 cars somehow)

12) Your guess of $40,000/car for design, approval, production of a
specialized car is way off.

13) You forgot server costs (stitching the images)

14) You forgot storage costs (storing, transferring) millions of photos.

15) You forgot IT and management costs to support all this shit. $8M will buy
you a few executives in charge of this project.

16) Your estimate of $10/hr for the driver salary is way off (assuming it's
just a driver, and not a trained technician). Average salary of a cab drive in
NYC is $25/hr. Chicago - $17/hr. Los Angeles - $17.5/hr. That's not counting
the benefits - health insurance, social security, etc.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Heh, part of the goal of 'simplfying' is so that you can reason about things.
Most people don't really conceptualize what it means to have 100 billion
dollars of 'cash on hand'.

We can make the numbers more accurate. Hell if Tim Cook hired me and gave me
the budget for it we could knock this out in a couple of years. I'm sure there
are at least half a dozen folks out there who could. The simple point remains
though which is that you can solve this problem with money, and you can make
the solution time arbitrarily short by scaling the money.

~~~
spaghetti
Apple could solve this problem with money by licensing Google's existing
service. Actually building a competing service can't be solved with money
alone. Just think of the number of people involved.

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helpbygrace
There's verb in Korea.

Fix the cowshed after loosing cows.

~~~
est
Is it 망우보뢰(亡牛補牢)?

It's actually Chinese (亡羊补牢 from 戰國策).

~~~
helpbygrace
The translation is almost same, however, the meaning is quite different.

Chinese 망양보뢰 means that it is not too late to fix the cowshed after lost.
Korean, however, shows the useless of the fixing activity. Later connotes the
regret.

:)

~~~
est
That's an interesting find. Confirmed. 소 잃고 외양간 고친다

source:
[http://www.ntnu.edu.tw/tcsl/yuyanwenhua/96/downloads/languag...](http://www.ntnu.edu.tw/tcsl/yuyanwenhua/96/downloads/language/8.doc)

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acomjean
Maps are very iterative. As someone in charge of mapping the 400 or so artists
in Somerville Ma, I can say the first couple years we tried google maps, it
was decent, yet imperfect. It gets better every year, but there were still
some addresses that it put in the wrong place up to last year when it finally
got the addresses right.

Getting good maps takes a lot of time, it will take years for Apple and they
might never be as good as google at it. But competition is good for all as it
raises the bar. It seems to have some interesting feature like telling you if
a restaurant is open graphically.

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/review-ios-6-gets-
the-s...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/review-ios-6-gets-the-spit-and-
polish-treatment/)

Amazing how we've become so dependent on mobile maps.

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PeterisP
Too little, too late - they don't need 6 developers working for 6 months to
improve their map code; they need 600 mappers/data entry guys/data-gathering
car drivers for a few years to improve their map data instead.

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topbanana
It's not the client application that's the root cause of this, it's poor data.
It will take more than 6 iOS developers to fix that.

~~~
bobbles
Well according to TomTom the data is solid, and its the client thats the
problem.

"TomTom's Lea Armstrong says users' experience is determined by the map it
supplies and features added by handset makers and third-party software
providers based on "their own vision and needs." In other words, don't blame
us."

[http://www.freep.com/article/20120921/NEWS09/120921012/Did-A...](http://www.freep.com/article/20120921/NEWS09/120921012/Did-
Apple-iOS-6-take-wrong-turn-with-Maps-)

~~~
jrabone
You and anyone else can cross-check the data at <http://routes.tomtom.com/>

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clarky07
Good to see they are working on it.

~~~
clarky07
sorry about the multiple posts. I did this on an app and it apparently failed
miserably.

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bluman
Speaking as a GIS analyst it looks like a large part of their problems are bad
cartography followed by incorrect assumptions or spotty analysis of their
vendor's data. I don't see how hiring more programmers will fix those issues.

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kefs
they should hire someone to fix that form.

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willrobinson
Google the Merciful should just send over a few maps people and help them out.
What fun is a "thermonuclear war"[1] when it's so one-sided?

1\. As declared by Our Man Jobs.

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wildmXranat
Jokes aside, they will need some CSI quality, image enhancement wizardy at the
moment. For what it's worth, I wish that they pull it off sooner than later.

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DigitalSea
With a little luck some developers from the Nokia maps team come on board and
show Apple how a real maps application is supposed to work.

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barista
Not surprised. If there is one feedback so far about the new iOS6, its that it
needs work.

~~~
bmeckel
Well iOS 6 on the whole is pretty decent. It's maps that is a true train-
wreck. That being said, it's not suprising that launching a brand new map
service is going to be worse than the established one that's had years of
feedback and growing pains of its own. Also, this was really the only way for
Apple to get that type of feedback, so the actual decision to do so isn't
surprising. That doesn't mean I don't want my damn google maps back though.

~~~
piyush_soni
Yeah but "brand new map service" can't be an excuse to drive people in the
river or make them fall of the bridge. The product they've launched can at
best be called an alpha (not even a beta product) which was a foolish decision
by the decision makers IMHO.

