“The flaws with Apple Maps and previously with Apple’s voice recognition software, Siri, reveal some deep flaws with Tim Cook’s work as CEO,” Peter Cohan writes for Forbes. “You might think that Tim Cook is doing a spectacular job. After all, since taking over as CEO on August 24, 2011, Apple stock has risen 74%, and its revenues and profits have soared 66% and 85% in the last year.”
“But since the Apple Maps fiasco, Apple has lost $30 billion in stock market value, reports The Guardian,” Cohan writes. “At the core of this loss in value may well be the gap between the technical reality of a new product and the way that product is sold to the public. Plenty of technologies are imperfect when they are first sold to the public. It appears as though Apple Maps had so many flaws — I pointed out its six most epic fails – that Apple could be rotting from the stem down.”
Cohan writes, “How so? Either Cook was not aware of the problems with Apple Maps — in which case he is showing that he does not care about the quality of the products that Apple makes. Or Cook knew about the flaws and decided to launch the iPhone 5 anyway. And if he did the latter, the messaging Cook used to describe the product set expectations that were far better than the reality. And one of the most basic principles of marketing anything is that it is far better to exceed diminished expectations than to fall short of exuberant ones.”
“The core of Apple’s problem may be an Apple executive by the name of Scott Forstall,” Cohan writes. “As former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gasse pointed out, Forstall was behind the flawless Apple Maps demo and those flowery adjectives. And Forstall’s demo of the buggy Siri ‘seemed not only to understand every question he put to it, but to have a snappy answer. It has not worked so well in the wild, at least not for me,’ according to Fortune’s Phillip Elmer-Dewitt.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
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