Apple's Mapping Strategy: Today China. Tomorrow the World - Forbes

Apple Maps is the worst-received new product to come out of Cupertino since the 1993 launch of the Newton, its first touch-screen device, Maps is the child of a nasty divorce between two of the world’s most powerful companies, and it has many industry observers trying to understand how Apple could enter the mobile maps market so late with a product that is so bad.

There have been several partial answers, most of them coming from people like me who have no real access to inside information to two of the most tight-lipped technologies companies of the Conversational Age.

All Things D seems to have been among the few with any real access. It reported  that Apple decided to make its own maps after it ran into a dispute with Google over voice-guided directions.

The result is not without irony. The recently released Apple maps does indeed provide voice-guided directions, but they seem more likely to guide you off a bridge as to get you where you want to go.

Consensus is pretty universal that Apple Maps are inferior, not just to Google maps, but to every other mobile map you can think of. People wonder why Apple didn’t just leave Google and cut a deal with Yahoo!, Microsoft or some other vendor.

Users of Apple mobile devices have been forming fast migrations to alternative mapping. Many have started using Waze, which allows users to share commuting data as they experience it and, by the way, has voice-guided directions. I’ve played with it and have been growing fond of it, but it is designed mostly as a commuter’s tool and my commute is from our master bedroom to my home office and I can find my destination even without morning coffee.

Primarily, I am one of many former users of Google Maps on the iPhone who found a simple way to return to Google Maps on my iPhone and iPad. All you need to do is go to maps.google.com on your device. A pop-up will offer to save to your desktop. Click on it, and it creates an icon identical to a mobile app from the Apple Store. Works fine, it’s free but now if you click on a location-based ad, Google shares no revenue[RL1]  with Apple.

I hadn’t heard about the back-door bickering that John Paczkowski reported on in his excellent All Things D piece, and I’m sure it is entirely accurate, but there are more things going on here than just a feature feud between two powerful partners who have simultaneously become bitter rivals.

Walther Isaacson reported, in his authorized Steve Jobs biography, that Jobs felt betrayed by his erstwhile friend Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, who  sat on the Apple board. He felt that Android was a direct rip-off of the iPhone and it resulted in Schmidt’s having to resign from the Apple board.

Jobs is gone, but the perception of Google as its worst marketplace rival is said to live on among Apple executives. That alone could have set off this recent, unfortunate separation.

The problem is so much of Apple’s marketplace strengthâ€"and hardware-pricing strategyâ€"is based on product elegance, and few people see anything elegant about the new Apple Maps. In fact, most people call it what Steve Jobs was fond of calling most competing products: “crap.”

But this time around, the word is not being used by Apple, but about Apple. The new maps are crap. There is speculation at industry gatherings, among analysts, among editors and in the social networks about what Steve Jobs would have done, and the consensus is he would never have allowed Apple to introduce such a not-ready-for-prime-time product. He would have badgered and humiliated employees to make something better, and to get it done in time for a press conference scheduled to meet deadlines set by marketingâ€"not product-based decisions.