Live data from Hacker News

Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

tech.fortune.cnn.com

121–130 of 132 posts

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#121
post #120

Nah. I don't agree with the premise of this article. This was not one person's decision. Many actors had to be involved in the decision making process. For some reason Apple decided that kicking Google off the platform was worth the abuse they'd have to endure with Maps. Those who keep saying "Maps is great" need to leave an egocentric view and realize that there are millions of users all around the world with differ…

> According to this either 60% of the locations either incorrect or missing altogether. According to a followup article ( http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps ) the old Maps app fails this exact test at least as badly. It just fails a bit differently . Whereas the new Maps app often says it can't find anything, the old one would for a similarly sized group of searches silently err on the side of findi…

It only failed when he left out the country name from the search. Once he added the country name the new map barely changed, but the new one got dramatically better.

The problem is very simple: The same city name shows in in multiple countries and the old map just didn't know which one he wanted.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#122
post #100

No, Apple has a "liberal arts problem" in that they don't seem to have the hard core folks to do algorithms in the way that Google does. Apple has a lot of smart people, but can you really see them building a self driving car with tons of lasers spinning on it in order to have super accurate maps? I can't. But that's what Google did. Its also a "device centric problem": I'm always struck when talking with someone fro…

No, Apple has a "liberal arts problem" -- Seriously? This is "analysis"? A "a self driving car with tons of lasers spinning on it"? Learn before you speak. The noticeable problems are not subtle: clouds covering cities in the UK, buildings not being named on College Campus, etc. Stadia 0.5km out of place. They are obvious, silly, dealbreaker problems for Soccer Moms and Sociology FFS. Algo's are not going to solve th…

Totally agree. I know, from many sources that a lot of human labor goes into making the Google data so good. They used to give out cookies to employees who would filter search results as porn/not porn. Algos can only get you so far.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#124
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, and I granted that point already. However, a lot of people live in China , too, and it's being widely reported that Apple Maps is much better than Google Maps' data, in China. I'll just give one link, but a little googling around proves the point quite well: http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/gadget/314283/apple-maps-bet... You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of er…

You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of errors. I don't know if I'd make this comparison. The level of erroneous data in Apple Maps is just insane compared to Google Maps.

Depends on where you live: http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#125
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, and I granted that point already. However, a lot of people live in China , too, and it's being widely reported that Apple Maps is much better than Google Maps' data, in China. I'll just give one link, but a little googling around proves the point quite well: http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/gadget/314283/apple-maps-bet... You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of er…

You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of errors. I don't know if I'd make this comparison. The level of erroneous data in Apple Maps is just insane compared to Google Maps.

Depends on where you live: http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#126
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, and I granted that point already. However, a lot of people live in China , too, and it's being widely reported that Apple Maps is much better than Google Maps' data, in China. I'll just give one link, but a little googling around proves the point quite well: http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/gadget/314283/apple-maps-bet... You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of er…

You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of errors. I don't know if I'd make this comparison. The level of erroneous data in Apple Maps is just insane compared to Google Maps.

Depends on where you live: http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#127
post #64

Nah. I don't agree with the premise of this article. This was not one person's decision. Many actors had to be involved in the decision making process. For some reason Apple decided that kicking Google off the platform was worth the abuse they'd have to endure with Maps. Those who keep saying "Maps is great" need to leave an egocentric view and realize that there are millions of users all around the world with differ…

"If only 5% of the data is wrong, and we have 2 billion searches per month, that means 100 million ..." Please go back to stats class.

Please leave more useful comments and explain the supposed error.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#128
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If only 5% of the data is wrong, and we have 2 billion searches per month, that means 100 million ..." Please go back to stats class.

Please leave more useful comments and explain the supposed error.

Well off the top of my head it'd be assuming that searches were distributed randomly w.r.t bad data, whereas in all likelihood there may be some (inverse) relationship between the badness of an area and its search popularity. In general living outside the US I was happy with the gmaps solution generally, apple maps had some glaring errors in my neck of the woods on launch.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#129
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am German and we didn't get all Siri features before iOS 6 (wolfram Alpha is still missing). But I tried it more in the last days and am really impressed! Even when I thought "oh, I mumbled the word, Siri won't get it" it was correctly recognized. I most use it as text to speech for SMS. And checking Fußball Bundesliga works good. (But only first league, no info available for second league.) Since iOS 6 (or at east…

I'm from germany too - I mentioned this before, but did you notice that you can't speak to Siri in english at all when its set to german? This is problematic when telling Siri to play music by any artist whose name, band or album is pronounced in english - a native german name would work though. This, I guess, would apply to every non-english country and seems like a quite an oversight rendering music controls via Si…

Yes, you are absolutely right!

Me: "Suche nach Häcker News"

Siri: "Das Web nach Hecker News durchsuchen"

Googles Search: "Meinten Sie: Hacker News"

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#130
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If only 5% of the data is wrong, and we have 2 billion searches per month, that means 100 million ..." Please go back to stats class.

Please leave more useful comments and explain the supposed error.

it assumes uniform search distribution
Post reply on HN