The New York Times is not known as a publication that looks for the silver lining in news, but they make a point that may be the only good one for Apple when it comes to their disastrous iOS 6 maps launch.
They certainly couldn’t get any worse.
In the ongoing cold war between Apple and Google, users were hit as the first casualty. The brand new maps, brought about as a replacement to help remove a relationship between the two tech giants that has existed since the first iPhone, are so bad they’ve become comical. It’s not funny in the way that Google handled their 8-bit maps for April Fools’ Day this year. It’s comical in a way that makes us bring back a word that we haven’t used in years…
Fail.
Epic proportions.
Techcrunch summed it up by reporting on a single Tweet:
As @winjer pointed out, Apple renaming the English town Doncaster “Duncaster” was “quite special”.
The whole maps system, it seems, is special. This will be fixed. Apple doesn’t keep a bad product on the market for very long. The real question here is how they were willing to let such a dog get released in the first place. Was it that important to get off the Google breast milk? Has the cold war escalated to the point that users are going to be hurt on both sides because of unshared innovations and an unwillingness to work together? The tech world needs both of these companies to thrive and improve for innovation to continue to escalate at the pace that it should.
In the end, we are the casualties of friendly fire when mistakes like this happen.
