Is Apple Losing Its Way?

However, Sharma says, there is a difference between beta and unfinished. "It is perfectly fine to launch competing apps and services—but not at the expense of quality," he adds. "The maps app wasn't fully baked. It was rushed through."

Still, Apple has made mistakes before and recovered. Two years ago it tried to launch a cloud storage service called MobileMe that proved expensive and complicated, and didn't receive much uptake amid bad reviews. Last year it rebounded from that setback with the iCloud (see "Apple Puts the Cloud Into All Its Devices").

Fixing Apple Maps' address and directions problems will take a lot of painstaking work, says Marco Gruteser, a professor at Rutgers University and an expert in location and mapping technologies.

 "The egregious mistakes can be fixed quite rapidly, but getting all the details correct—this is a continual process, and over the coming months or perhaps a year, we will see a much better product," he says. "But that process cannot stop—roads are changing, new buildings are being erected, addresses are being changed—it is a continual enhancement process."

Apple said in a statement: "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."

Apple will likely learn from its mistakes in more ways than one. "It's plausible that they can monitor the interactions with the map applications itself; for example, if you pull up a route and it leads you to the wrong destination, then you press the cancel button instead of the navigation button—Apple may be able to use that," says Gruteser.

Apple, iPhone 5, iPhone 5 maps, maps

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