Apple Maps Navigation 3D View (Photo credit: Yuya Tamai)
The tech news sites all reported yesterday that Richard Williamson, who oversaw the maps team at Apple, was fired, because of the recent Apple Maps PR fiasco.
I decided to look up Richard Williamson on LinkedIn. I don't know him, and my only information is what has been published online.
He ran the Maps team for the last 11 months. Previously he "contributed significantly to the design direction and implementation of iOS for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad." He, "managed teams responsible for iOS interface, including keyboards, Safari, Maps, YouTube…", the list goes on. It gets better: he was the "Founding member of the team that created WebKit and Apples Safari web browser." Oh, he is also listed on 17 patents, for inventions such as "Keyboards for Portable Electronic Devices."
According to his resume, Richard Williamson is whats commonly referred to as a "@#$ rock star" in Silicon Valley. He has been involved in and owned significant parts of one of the most successful product lines in the history of technology. And he managed a team that put together a very credible maps product, and for his troubles, he has just been fired in a very public and embarrassing way.
As a Xoogler, who has some tangential familiarity with the inner workings of Google Maps, I perhaps have a sense of the immense scale of the challenge that the Apple Maps team faced, that a lay person might not. Google Maps is an absolutely massive and hugely complex undertaking, with staggering depth. It is the creation of hundreds of engineers working for the last ten years at the best software company in the world. It is the product of thousands of content licensing agreements with data providers in hundreds of cities and countries. It has dozens of sub-products within it, from Google Transit (public transportation, e.g. subway, information and routing), Live Traffic, StreetView (and the incredible operation that makes that happen), Local search, image recognition technology for reading street and business signs, the list goes on and on. And on.
When I first heard that Apple was going to try and compete with Google Maps, given the above, my first reaction was to chuckle. Strategically it might make sense for Apple, as long as they have the patience and the appetite to invest the billions of dollars that it would take to catch up to Google. Apple has not traditionally done that well outside of hardware and operating systems.
When Apple Maps launched, it was apparent that they had made a very nice looking product, but functionality-wise it was probably comparable to Google Maps circa 2007. I bet the Apple Maps team knew this.
The problem was that someone at Apple decided to rip Google Maps out of the iPhone and make Apple Maps the default mapping application, as part of the crushing tectonic plate-like battle between these online behemoths.
This shone a very bright and public spotlight on Apple Map's shortcomings, instead of letting Apple Maps develop gradually over time until it became competitive. That person was probably Scott Forstall, who has already paid the price.
But shooting the product manager for doing his job, and as far as I can tell, doing his job well?
That's not cool.
