Fast Company sat down with Apple executives Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi who pen up about learning from Apple’s failures.
A few snippets:
FC: What does it do to the development team, and to your plans, when something like Maps gets introduced and it’s derided immediately? [Maps was introduced in September, 2012, to universal scorn.] Does that slow down what you were hoping to do?
Cue: Well, look, the first thing is that you’re embarrassed. Let’s just deal with that one fact of emotion. I mean, these things mean a lot to us. We work really hard, and so you’re embarrassed. In the case of Maps, what it causes you to do is ask: How important is this? Is this a place where we need to triple down or quadruple down, or did we make that mistake because it’s not that important to us? We had long discussions at the ET [executive team] level about the importance of Maps, where we thought Maps was going in the future, and could we treat it as a third-party app? I mean, we don’t do every app. We’re not trying to create a Facebook app. We think they do a great job. We always came back to the conclusion that Maps was not one of those. It’s an integral part to the whole platform. There were so many features that we wanted to build that are dependent on that technology, and we couldn’t see ourselves being in a position where that was something that we didn’t own.
Federighi: So it was a triple down, and it was a huge learning moment for Apple. Maps presented us with some relatively new challenges, where we needed to develop competencies that we initially didn’t appreciate, areas where we needed some depth, where we needed to take a new approach. We had great approaches for some of the other problems we’d been solving, but this one had some characteristics that meant we had to take some different approaches. So we had to ask: What do we have to learn?
FC: There’s a perception that there are more of [mistakes] than in the past.
Federighi: A world where people do not care about the quality of their experience is not a good world for Apple. A world where people care about those details and want to complain about them is the world where our values shine. That is our obsession. If people were like, “That’s good enough for me” …well, there are a lot of people who can provide that kind of experience.
Tons more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple needed to own Maps. It’s unfortunate it launched in such a way as it’ll take many years for the stank to wear off for some people. But, eventually, if Apple keeps improving the already long since vastly-improved Maps, the odor surrounding its launch will subside.
Apply the following quotes to vehicles or anything else Apple makes or might make. Apple’s “owning the primary technologies” is crucial.
I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do. – Steve Jobs, October 12, 2004
[Apple’s] reason for being is the same as it’s always been — to make the world’s best products that really enrich people’s lives. That hasn’t changed. And we do that through owning the primary technologies. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, August 9, 2016
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CEO Cook discusses Apple secrecy, company values, the future, and more – August 10, 2016