Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem? • Hacker News Board

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#61

Post by pilsetnieks » Sat, Sep 29, 2012, 9:33 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #50

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…

Everybody knows by now that the maps are no good. I think that at this point the rage and anger is about overpromising and knowingly shipping an unfinished product of insufficient quality, something Apple has never (arguably) done before.

As it says in the article, the same could be applied to Siri but Siri came with the "beta" warning label, a lot of people understand that voice recognition and that kind of pseudo-AI is really hard, and it was better than anything competitors had to offer, which, obviously, is not the case with maps.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#62

Post by paulschreiber » Sat, Sep 29, 2012, 9:33 PM UTC

batista wrote: post #10

w1ntermute wrote: post #2

Forstall has been called "Apple's chief asshole"[0] - he channels Steve Jobs's approach of being a douchebag, but doesn't seem to have acquired the same level of perfectionism as Jobs. 0: http://www.dailytech.com/Apples+chief+Ahole+Forstall+Keeps+S...

He also gives me that impression when I see him on Keynotes, one of a power grabbing, back-stabbing kind of guy. Which could or could not be true, I'm talking purely from a "face-reading" standpoint. The exact opposite of that would be Bob Mansfield.

Fosrtall is the kind of guy who would sell you a used car and hit on your wife.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#63

Post by spinchange » Sat, Sep 29, 2012, 9:50 PM UTC

awolf wrote: post #51

tlogan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working great in Bay Area? Who told you that? I was under impression that this all similar to "antena gate" (kinda not big deal), but iOS maps are really really bad even in Bay Area. EDIT: Here is an example: Search for "428 University Ave, Palo Alto": you will end up in Los Gatos.

Ah, I see that too. Clearly problematic since there doesn't seem to be a way at all to load up the intended 428 University Ave address. No good. Still though, "really really bad" makes me think you have experienced many other issues. I'm genuinely curious about how Maps performs in the places it is "supposed" to be at least passable. Got any other examples? Meta: please don't edit your comments to respond to sub-comm…

Both David Pogue and Anil Dash have written about getting driving directions that takes them to the wrong location in places like New York city.

I'm just one user, but if a navigation app takes you the right address in the wrong location in a place like the Bay area or NYC, that's a "really bad" problem.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#64

Post by leif » Sat, Sep 29, 2012, 9:56 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #50

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.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#65

Post by mikeryan » Sat, Sep 29, 2012, 9:59 PM UTC

tlogan wrote: post #44

stevenleeg wrote: post #5

Since when has Siri been "an embarrassment for Apple?"

Does it work for you? I stil have to meet a single person which actually can ask Siri something and Siri understands it and gives reasonable answer... I was under impression that it did not work because I'm ESL speaker: but it also does not work for people who speak english very well. Aha and there is class action lawsuit: http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2012/06/12/class-action-lawsuit-file... Here is the quote: Ryan asked S…

Siri works fabulously for me. Here's how I use it, these use cases work consistently.

1. Call my wife at her office. 2. Text My Wife - I'll be home in 15 minutes. 3. Set a timer for 15 minutes. 4. Where's the closest Mc Donalds.

Obviously I'm not looking for a magic speaking encyclopedia of knowledge, that being said my primary use case for Siri is in the car, and for 90% of what I need to do it works fine.

BTW I just asked Siri "What is a class action" and it asked me if I wanted to search the web for "What is a class action" and it found the definition. I'll give it this though, whether automated or manually Siri's been pretty consistently tuned to get better and better as its gone along which was likely to happen as it got a larger and larger dataset to work with.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#66

Post by eaurouge » Sat, Sep 29, 2012, 10:03 PM UTC

Why people don't seem to get this is beyond me. Releasing Siri and Maps early were purely strategic decisions. Clearly both Siri and Maps can be improved more rapidly if some of the development is crowdsourced. Apple would believe (and rightly so) that the brand has enough excess credibility/goodwill with the public to ride this out.

Google has done this repeatedly with products like GOOG-411, a data collection exercise that was promptly shut down once it had served its purpose. Apple is taking a risk here because Maps is not some 'free' offering like GOOG-411, but they've done the math and will come out ahead when the dust settles.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#67

Post by eurleif » Sat, Sep 29, 2012, 10:06 PM UTC

eaurouge wrote: post #66

Why people don't seem to get this is beyond me. Releasing Siri and Maps early were purely strategic decisions. Clearly both Siri and Maps can be improved more rapidly if some of the development is crowdsourced. Apple would believe (and rightly so) that the brand has enough excess credibility/goodwill with the public to ride this out. Google has done this repeatedly with products like GOOG-411, a data collection exerc…

GOOG-411 worked well, in my experience; and it also let you make free calls. I think it was probably a PR win for Google.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#68

Post by pmjordan » Sat, Sep 29, 2012, 10:11 PM UTC

pilsetnieks wrote: post #61

robomartin wrote: post #50

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…

Everybody knows by now that the maps are no good. I think that at this point the rage and anger is about overpromising and knowingly shipping an unfinished product of insufficient quality, something Apple has never (arguably) done before. As it says in the article, the same could be applied to Siri but Siri came with the "beta" warning label, a lot of people understand that voice recognition and that kind of pseudo-A…

...something Apple has never (arguably) done before.

Well, pretty much every 10.x.0 OSX release has had some nasty regressions in it, but they're generally not quite as easy to spot as the maps fiasco. What's worse is that this isn't a new product that starts off a bit crap with the view of improving it over time - there have been a few examples of these as well.

Instead, from the users' point of view, the maps update falls plainly into the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" category. Users don't give a damn about contracts between Apple and Google. The Maps app has been there since iPhoneOS 1.0 and it's not had any drastic changes since then, despite its tremendous popularity. I find it baffling that they didn't release the new map material as an extra mode with more features (3D, turn by turn navigation), in addition to Google's map material for the classic 2D view until iOS7 comes along. That would probably have completely avoided the problem and given Apple an extra year to get their data into shape. The new features, although a little half-baked, would still have been seen as an improvement by users, whereas now they're just blinded by the seething rage of having the core functionality yanked out underneath them.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#69

Post by nachteilig » Sat, Sep 29, 2012, 10:31 PM UTC

As much as I dislike Forstall--particularly the way he presents--I don't think we can lay this all at his feet. You can bet that even Steve had a hand in this decision.

Re: Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?

#70

Post by CamperBob2 » Sat, Sep 29, 2012, 10:32 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #50

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…

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 different experiences.

I have a theory about these people -- they are the ones who never realized that you could search Maps for place names.

If you search for street addresses, both Maps implementations perform OK. But the strength of Google's database is that you can type almost anything within reason into the Maps search box and get where you want to go. For my first few weeks of iPhone usage, whenever I wanted to find a nearby "Starbucks" or "Barnes and Noble" or $name_of_local_restaurant, I'd do the search in Safari, pick a likely result, and then click on the page's address link, assuming there was one, in order to open it in Maps. Eventually I realized that I could type the search string directly into Maps, and that made life a lot easier. If that stopped working or became less effective on the iPhone that I use for navigation in the car, I would scream bloody murder.

So my guess is that the people who aren't complaining about Apple's maps application are either living in metro areas that were carefully vetted by the data provider, searching for street addresses directly, or both.