Thanks to Sean French for the link.
Apple Maps — striking new feature
Trudy Miller, an Apple spokeswoman, released this statement yesterday: “Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service. We are excited to offer this service with innovative new features like Flyover…”.
Quite so. Thanks to Technology Review for the pic.
The IoS map disaster: Antennagate redux
Lots of people are outraged by the glaring defects in Apple’s maps — now a mandatory part of IoS6. (Jean-Jouis Gassee takes a more nuanced view.) But David Talbot’s Technology Review piece rightly focusses on Apple’s Kremlin-like PR response to the fiasco.
This disaster (see “Smartphone Makers Can’t Afford to Mess Up Mapping”) is still unfolding. It’s worse than just being a bad service. Given the ubiquity of these devices, it’s not hard to imagine people getting sent down Class 4 unmaintained roads in rural areas and getting stuck in ditches. Others may be getting directed the wrong-way on one-way streets and posing a danger of head-on collisions. It’s only a matter of time before anecdotes like these will start emerging.
Apple is in full spin mode. Trudy Miller, an Apple spokeswoman, released this statement yesterday: “Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service. We are excited to offer this service with innovative new features like Flyover, turn by turn navigation, and Siri integration. We launched this new map service knowing it is a major initiative and that we are just getting started with it. Maps is a cloud-based solution and the more people use it, the better it will get. We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better.”
Personally I’m going to avoid updating to IoS6 for the time being. But what I’d really like to know is how the screw-up was allowed to happen in a company that’s usually good at getting working stuff out on time. And isn’t it strange how even a smart company doesn’t get it that old-style PR responses don’t wash any more. The right thing to have done would have been to say: “we f****d up and here’s a voucher to compensate you for any inconvenience that the maps might have caused”.
This is like Antennagate all over again.
MORE: Business Insider thinks that part of the problem may be due to the fact that Apple hasn’t thrown enough resources at the mapping application:
In June, we talked to a pair of Googlers involved in its mapping product, and they said that Google has 1,100 full time employees and 6,000 contractors working on its mapping products. Those 7,000 people do all sorts of granular work.
What do these 7,000 people do? Our source says they are “street view drivers, people flying planes, people drawing maps, people correcting listings, and people building new products.”
Apple is reportedly hiring developers to improve its Maps product.
Seems like it’s going to take a lot more than that.
Tablescape
Twitter, disenchantment and etymology
Mt friend Michael Dales has written a thoughtful blog post triggered by disagreement with something I wrote about Twitter in my Observer column.
Here’s the relevant para:
This new disenchantment with Twitter seems daft to me. […] as for the API restrictions, well, Twitter isn’t a charity. Those billions of tweets have to be processed, stored, retransmitted – and that costs money. Twitter has already had more than $1bn of venture capital funding. Like Facebook, it has to make money, somehow. Otherwise it will disappear. Even on the internet there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Michael says:
I agree with John’s reasoning, but not his conclusion that it’s daft. The reason why is this: in an effort to make money, Twitter is changing the product. I think it’s similarly daft to me (sorry John :), to assume that just because I liked product A, when it’s changed into product B, I should like it just as much. I don’t disagree that Twitter needs to find a revenue stream, or object that it should make changes to make that happen. I don’t agree however that I should like the new Twitter just because I liked the old Twitter.
I now have to repay the compliment. I agree with Michael’s reasoning. It’s not ‘daft’ for him to come to his conclusion.
The problem — I now realise — lies in my casual use of the term ‘daft’. When I wrote that the “new disenchantment with Twitter seems daft to me” I should perhaps have used the word “naive”. At any rate, what was in my mind as I wrote the sentence was that it’s naive or unrealistic to expect that a service that is expensive to provide can continue forever without its owners seeking to commercialise it in some way.
The etymology of ‘daft’ is interesting btw. The wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary says that it derives from the Old English gedæfte — meaning “gentle” or “becoming” — and sees a progression over the centuries from “mild” (c.1200) to “dull” (c.1300) to “foolish” (mid-15c.) to “crazy” (1530s).
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
This morning’s Observer column.
The first thought to strike anyone stumbling upon the now-infamous Innocence of Muslims video on YouTube without knowing anything about it would probably be that it makes Monty Python’s The Life of Brian look like the work of Merchant Ivory. It’s daft, amateurish beyond belief and, well, totally weird. So the notion that such a fatuous production might provoke carnage in distant parts of the world seems preposterous.
And yet it did. In the process, the video created numerous headaches for a US administration struggling to deal with the most turbulent part of the world. But it also raised some tricky questions about the role that commercial companies play in regulating free speech in a networked world – questions that will remain long after Innocence of Muslims has been forgotten…
Contemporary instruments of torture
Coming soon to a fashion store near you!
Inside an ‘exclusive’ Leica launch party
This is a truly fascinating report by Michael Zhang of PetaPixel of what it was like to be a guest at an ‘exclusive’ Leica Launch Party at Photokina.
Some weeks ago, I received an invitation from Leica for a special launch party they were planning to hold the day before Photokina 2012 opened. The event was titled LEICA – DAS WESENTLICHE, which translates to “The Essentials”. Aside from stating that there would be product premieres and “photographic and musical highlights”, the invitation did not reveal much else about the event, which went down this past Monday. Here’s a first-hand account of what it’s like to attend one of these Leica parties.
It’s an excellent piece of detached reporting which conveys very well the nauseating ambience of the event. But what really brought me up short was this picture:
Mr Zhang didn’t recognise the couple, and nor did I. But it turns out that the woman is Phan Thi Kim Phuc and the man is Nick Ut, the `Pulitzer-winning AP photographer who took the famous photograph of her as a terrified, naked young girl fleeing across a bridge in Vietnam after a napalm attack.
I’m not entirely sure why, but the discovery that Leica were using the pair of them in this way makes me feel decidedly queasy. But then I loathe these corporate events anyway.
The Thick of It (the Coalition, that is)
Oh heck. I’ll just have to watch it.
Afghanistan, noun: Quagmire
I’ve been ranting on for a while (see here and here, for example) against the cant being talked by our politicians about Western involvement in Afghanistan. I cannot fathom why any sentient being could believe what they are telling us about what’s happening on that North West Frontier. The New Yorker‘s Dexter Filkin has been exceedingly perceptive about this for as long as I can remember. His latest piece continues that honourable tradition.
We can’t win the war in Afghanistan, so what do we do? We’ll train the Afghans to do it for us, then claim victory and head for the exits.
But what happens if we can’t train the Afghans?
We’re about to find out. It’s difficult to overstate just how calamitous the decision, announced Tuesday, to suspend most joint combat patrols between Afghan soldiers and their American and NATO mentors is. Preparing the Afghan Army and police to fight without us is the foundation of the Obama Administration’s strategy to withdraw most American forces—and have them stop fighting entirely—by the end of 2014. It’s our ticket home. As I outlined in a piece earlier this year, President Obama’s strategy amounts to an enormous gamble, and one that hasn’t, so far, shown a lot of promise. That makes this latest move all the more disastrous. We’re running out of time.
Nope. We have run out of time. But even if we had a century it wouldn’t have worked.