Seems exactly wrong to me - Google uses its free customers as beta testers, whereas its paying customers (Google Apps users) don't get to see the products until a year later.
You don't think Android 1.0, 1.6, 2.1, and 2.2 weren't a beta test of sorts? There wasn't even a software keyboard for a year after Android showed up.
iOS maps is in the same position that AndroidOS was in a year or two after the iPhone appeared. Substandard in comparison, largely functional with big gaps, but an expectation of quick improvement.
You are right they don't "sell" Android to you they enter commercial agreements with manufacturers to provide them with Android enabled with Google Services imposing significant conditions on them.
"Release early, release often" is good advice, and in that sense there's nothing wrong with using customers as "beta testers". No matter how good your QA department is, there're always unanticipated issues when you release at massive scale and push something to dozens of millions of users.
But you don't just rip out something millions of people depend upon for a function as critical as safe navigation in unfamiliar areas and replace it with something that has constant, pervasive issues performing its basic operations. A custom Maps application and dataset is a good business move, but you have to make sure it's at least a minimum viable product before you do the kind of rollout that Apple has done.
When Google replaces Gmail with the shinier "Googmail" and 25%+ of mail to the new service comes back undeliverable, and there's no reasonable method to revert to plain old Gmail, you'll have a comparable quagmire. The fact is that while Apple's Maps may occasionally work sort of well, the failure rates are unacceptably high; too high for anyone to trust the program any more.
It will take years to undo the damage from this, and I fully expect a good portion of people to swap iPhone for Android as a result.
It is a minimum viable product. If Apple maps shipped on the first version of the iphone no one would be complaining about it. As it is it now it takes away features that people are were used to using.
It's not a minimum viable product. If it were, Apple wouldn't be writing this letter. Maybe it would have been viable in the past (also more widely considered viable in the past: paper atlases), but it's not viable today in this context (perhaps it could have been viable as an optional beta, instead of an irrevocable feature regression) as demonstrated by this apology letter. You don't have to write apology letters for viable stuff.
Google's 'beta' is equivalent to spiderman's broadway 'previews'. When they open to the public, start amassing huge amounts of user data, using the public for R&D, call it what you want, the public is paying.
How many people would buy an iPhone without iOS, or even with a poorly implemented iOS? Far fewer.
Apple sells an experience — the whole package. They always have. That's why Antennagate, a hardware issue, and Maps, a software issue, are equally frustrating and newsworthy. Apple proposes to remove the hardware/software distinction and deliver a magical device that just works.
Maps no longer just work for many people. And that's the problem with magic. It's very brittle. The clock strikes midnight and everyone turns back into a pumpkin, the ball is over. And so many people are frustrated, because they pay a premium for this abstraction, this magic, and it has disappeared, and that annoys them, and it scares them, because if Maps can stop working when it used to work, then so can my Phone, and my Email, and all my kids' baby pictures, and overnight, Apple's customers no longer feel in control.
I like the new maps (I live in Austin, the data seems pretty solid.) But this letter is a big deal. For the first time that I'm aware of, Apple has publicly admitted that there is no Wizard of Oz, and they're just a man behind the curtain, and would you please bear with us while we iron out the glitches?
What a specious argument. And in other stories, blogs and comments, we hear that Apple takes 80% of the mobile industry's profits and about the high margins on iProducts and the $100B+ cash hoard that they have. But now the tone is all about how poor Apple was forced into a corner by Google and others and had to subject its users to bad maps.
Guess what? Maps is hard. Why did Nokia buy Navteq in 2008 for a whopping $8B? Why do you think Amazon recently choose to license Navteq maps from Nokia for their Kindle tablets' Maps API?
Given that Amazon makes $7 million profit a quarter and Apple makes $4M profit an hour like Gruber sneeringly likes to remind us[1], is it wrong to expect better maps from a phone that costs much more than a run of the mill cheap Android phone? What excuse is there for driving directions that direct you to drive on train tracks? [2]
