Tim Cook is Apple's CEO. While he might negotiate agreements that lead to an improved logistics situation, there are thousands of other people involved in getting Apple products to their destination.
But assuming he was, surely you aren't suggesting that Apple's speedy delivery times are the pinnacle of human achievement, and that by their accomplishment of this, that every other human undertaking must be trivial.
Writing a Google maps clone is extremely difficult, and if Apple expected to be successful with it already with the meager amount of resources they have put into it, then it was an impossible task and I'd be delighted to tell Tim Cook, that it was in fact, too hard.
As it has been mentioned elsewhere, Google has like 7000 people working on maps, while Apple has 13000 people period. It's doubtful that they would have over 60 percent of their workforce plugging away on a maps clone, so clearly they can't expect their program to be better, especially when Google has been doing this for several years already.
But my comment wasn't even intended to excuse the state of IOS Maps, I was simply pointing out that while we don't know for sure what happened, there are some possible scenarios where the failure wasn't this guy's fault. I was also pointing out that the statement "there is no such thing as not my fault" at the executive level, it a statement that is only true when an executive is given free reign over his work, without anyone else overriding or commandeering.
Before Cook was CEO he was SVP of worldwide operations. It was his job to get those thousands of people and suppliers marching to the same beat.
And yes, speedy delivery time is an achievement. It might be for computers in this instance but militaries and countries are run on their logistics. While we take for advantage shopping for fresh food most people don't realise the amount of preparation that goes into getting fruit to ripen in the stores.
So no, I don't think Maps are hard. The hard part (data acquisition) has already been done. But it can't be a "hobby" either. If they were planning to do their own maps, and the purchase of C3 and Placebase years ago meant they were, they could have looked around and saw that Nokia, Microsoft, and Google, were shelling out serious cash to get it right Apple spending a tenth of that was naive.
As CEO, Cook was right take the blame. If he publicly passed the buck to Forstall I would seriously question his leadership.
But assuming he was, surely you aren't suggesting that Apple's speedy delivery times are the pinnacle of human achievement, and that by their accomplishment of this, that every other human undertaking must be trivial.
Writing a Google maps clone is extremely difficult, and if Apple expected to be successful with it already with the meager amount of resources they have put into it, then it was an impossible task and I'd be delighted to tell Tim Cook, that it was in fact, too hard.
As it has been mentioned elsewhere, Google has like 7000 people working on maps, while Apple has 13000 people period. It's doubtful that they would have over 60 percent of their workforce plugging away on a maps clone, so clearly they can't expect their program to be better, especially when Google has been doing this for several years already.
But my comment wasn't even intended to excuse the state of IOS Maps, I was simply pointing out that while we don't know for sure what happened, there are some possible scenarios where the failure wasn't this guy's fault. I was also pointing out that the statement "there is no such thing as not my fault" at the executive level, it a statement that is only true when an executive is given free reign over his work, without anyone else overriding or commandeering.