NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 10: People walk through the Apple retail store in Grand Central Terminal on December 10, 2012 in New York City. Apple Inc. stock was down $4.56 per share, or 0.86 percent decline as investors and analysts worry that the U.S market is becoming saturated with apple products. Apple, the world's most valuable publicly traded company, has lost $167 billion in market value in less than three months. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) (Photo: )
While Apple's new products are generally met with fawning praise and long lines, its first map app inspired nothing but complaints. It mislabeled cities, flattened the Statue of Liberty, didn’t include public transportation and is, by one estimate, three-times more likely to get you lost than Google Maps.
The company at first defended its work. “We are continuously improving it," a spokesperson argued, "and as Maps is a cloud-based solution, the more people use it, the better it will get."
But the problem was not necessarily that Apple Maps was a terrible product. It just wasn’t as good as Google Maps. "What Apple has learned is that maps are really hard," Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt told AllThingsDigital in an on-stage interview shortly after Apple Maps went live. "We invested hundreds of millions of dollars in satellite work, airplane work, drive-by work, to get the maps accurate."
From a business perspective, cutting Google out of the iOS home screen makes sense. While the companies once happily played in different industries (with Schmidt even serving on Apple’s board at one point), the rise of Android makes them competitors with diverging interests. From a product perspective, however, Apple's maps app replaced an important feature with an inferior one, and that was not a good move.
Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged his mistake in a public apology letter. It's not the first time Apple has apologized. Steve Jobs made a similar concession regarding problems with syncing system MobileMe (Apple has also apologized for antennagate and other mishaps). But it was the first time the apology read like a sincere admission of a mistake rather than a response to a customer service complaint. Cook went as far as to recommend using competitor map products while Apple gets its own up to par. Not only did his apology calm the uproar, but it demonstrated a kinder, humbler Apple.
Google's unique media-streaming orb received a lot of stage time at the Google I/O conference in June. High prices and lack of functionality ultimately doomed the device, however, and Google pulled the plug on the project before the thing started shipping. Those who pre-ordered did get their money back, as well as a free Nexus Q -- hang on to those, as they may soon be collector's items. (The Nexus Q is still listed in the Google Play Store, but it is not for sale, nor have we heard so much as a whisper about it in months). Read more about what the Nexus Q was supposed to do here, and more on its delay here.
Like Facebook Camera, the Facebook IPO did not get off to a good start. NASDAQ's technical software faltered at the big moment, causing an unexpected 30-minute delay when FB became available to the public; and, too, the stock's price plummeted, failing to experience the first-day boom that many initial offerings regularly enjoy. Facebook's IPO was, by most accounts, one of the larger embarrassments -- for NASDAQ, for underwriter Morgan Stanley and for Facebook itself -- of the year. At least people seem to be enjoying Timeline? Read more about the Facebook IPO debacle here.
Apple Maps
What more is there to say about Apple's new Maps app? A rare instance where Apple endlessly hyped a product only to apologize for its ineptitude, Apple Maps has been mocked so thoroughly -- on Twitter, on late-night shows, on a mesmerizing Tumblr and elsewhere -- that it seems redundant to thrash it again here. All you really need to know is that after testing out Apple Maps for a few months, 10 million people chose to download Google's Maps app in just under 48 hours after it was released earlier in December, making it one of the most quickly downloaded app of all time. Of course, it's still fun to look back at the shoddiest highlights from Apple Maps' brief time in the sun. Click here for our 19 favorite Apple Maps fails.
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