“Apple is piloting a program to tap into its vast number of retail store employees to help improve the company’s new Maps app for iOS 6,” Eric Slivka reports for MacRumors.
“Details on the initiative remain unclear, but multiple sources have indicated that participating stores will dedicate 40 hours of staff time per week, distributed among a number of employees, to manually examine Apple’s mapping data in their areas and submit corrections and improvements,” Slivka reports. “It is unknown exactly what procedures will be used to examine the data, whether it simply be side-by-side comparisons with Google Maps data or if more sophisticated efforts such as in-person verification will be used.”
Slivka reports, “Changes to maps will reportedly be submitted through a dedicated internal portal on Apple’s systems.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Okay, now that is genius! While we have our doubts that Maps can ever shake off the PR damage it has received to date — Jobs, how we wish Apple had introduced it as a “work in progress” and applied a “beta” tag to it prior to launch (by now, Apple likely does, too) — this is a very smart way to quickly get a large number of personnel on the case identifying errors and submitting fixes. If any company can figure out how to erase self-inflicted PR damage massively compounded by the FUD machine banging around in the echo chamber, it’s Apple. Maps will have to be three times as good as Google Maps to get a fair shake, but Apple is certainly capable of achieving that as Google Maps is far uglier and definitely nowhere near perfect.
Boy, this effort to utilize the vast retail staff is really a genius move! Go, Apple go!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]