Every day, it seems like there’s something new for Apple (AAPL) critics to complain about.
Yesterday, it’s that Apple “only” sold 5 million iPhone 5s on the first weekend, compared to 4 million iPhone 4Ss.
Friday, it was that Apple Maps was a terrible product and something that Steve Jobs would never have allowed.
The week before, Tim Cook and the rest of the executive team were “boring” during the launch event of the iPhone 5.
A year ago, it was to complain that iPhone 4S was not called a 5, only to see it shoot the lights out in terms of holiday quarter units sold.
Two years ago, Apple shipped its iPhone 4 with a “faulty” antenna, which got everyone up in arms.
The pattern here is that, when you’re a big and successful company, it gets boring for critics to keep saying how big and successful you are. Whether intentional or not, lots of critics or casual tweeters try to find something wrong with Apple because it sounds more novel.
None of these “problems” listed above have stood the test of time. The same people who shrieked about them before would now just shrug their shoulders if asked about them.
And, of course, there’s the Steve Jobs factor in all this too. Jobs was so mythical that we are almost hard-wired to search for evidence that the Apple empire he built is beginning to crumble before our eyes because he is no longer there to sweat every little crack in the facade.
So, let’s go back to the hot story of last Friday: Apple Maps. I contend that Maps’ release wasn’t a mistake at all. It was a necessary first step for Apple to having a dominant Maps product over Google.
The best article I’ve seen on Map-gate is by Kontra at Counternotions. In it, he clearly lays out that mapping is hard and requires lots of data. It took Google (GOOG) 8 years to get its product to its current iteration. Even now, Google Maps isn’t perfect. If I’m driving in the country somewhere, it won’t always default to the most direct path. Sometimes I have to apply common sense. But, of course, it is very good.
Apple has usually prioritized customer experience over self-interest, which is why they launched iPhone with data from Google (YouTube, Maps, Search) and Yahoo! (YHOO) from the start.
But at some point along the way – as the post-PC world evolved – Apple had to make a decision: is mapping a strategically important app that we need to control or not? And it’s not just for the current iPhones and iPads but also new products that they will launch down the line, such as a potential tighter integration with your car.
At the moment, I have to pay $500 every couple of years to have my car maker send me a physical Navigation DVD to put in my car with all the latest info. In a couple of years, it will likely be Apple or another provider pushing this info to my car through regular updates and then tracking my data and sharing ads or doing something else transactional with me.
Apple decided that it needed to have its own Maps product because it will be strategically important to the company for the next decade or more. So they made this move.
But why didn’t they perfect it? This is the kind of product that is so big and complex, Apple knew that it didn’t matter if it gave 1000 people in white coats working on this product 2 more quarters or 2 more years. There would be loads of mistakes afterwards with either approach.
The fastest way to improve the product was to get it out in the hands of users. Let the millions of users help get the product up the curve much faster than it would otherwise.
But, the critics say, that’s not the Apple way. It was the practical way and the right way thinking ahead to where Apple wants this product to be in 2 years. If they have to endure 2 weeks of complaints and funny Tumblr sites, so be it.
Several Apple Maps critics have compared it to MobileMe. They really should compare it to Siri.
Siri is a similarly large complex app to Maps, which – no matter how much extra time spent polishing it in the labs – cannot improve as quickly as when it is in the hands of users.
Last October, I wrote here in Forbes that – far from being just a minor product upgrade in the 4s – Siri was intended to (and likely will) be a Google killer. I believe that Apple sees it as a new way to help you get the information you need. We have been trained over the last 15 years to get an answer by typing into a blue box and then finding the best link in a list. That is search today.
I believe Apple thinks that it can help introduce an alternative method to solving that kind of informational-gathering problem. We will ask our executive assistant to do the work instead of typing into a blue box ourselves. That’s the vision for Siri.
We’re not there today obviously. Siri has sparked a lot of criticism that it doesn’t work in certain cities or with certain tasks. Some people hated the TV ads promoting it. Siri got an upgrade with iOS 6 to help out with lots of new tasks (e.g., sports, restaurant reservations, and languages) but it still has a long way to go.
Because it’s not perfect yet, the criticisms have subsided. In some ways, Siri has been forgotten – but it shouldn’t be.
Apple’s original vision for Siri is still intact, I believe. It hasn’t even been a year that it’s been released, but I would imagine that it’s vastly improved thanks to all the new data they’ve collected from real users in real situations over that period. More time in the lab wouldn’t have come close to getting the product to where it is now. And Steve Jobs knew that, which is why he green-lit Siri.
When will Siri hit that inflection point where we “ask Siri” more frequently than “Googling it”? My guess is that it won’t be until version 5 or 6 of Siri, so we still are several years away. However, when Apple bought Siri a few years ago, if Scott Forstall had asked Tim Cook and Steve Jobs about supporting him with a new product that could possibly overtake Google for information-retrieval within a decade but it would require a few iterations to get there, what do you think they would have said?
Eyes on the prize, folks. Eyes on the prize.
[Long AAPL and YHOO]
