Apple exec’s being open and honest
Cue: Here’s another thing about Maps: It’s expensive. We have thousands of people working on Maps.
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Cue: We have to be honest with ourselves. We’re not perfect, and we’re going to make mistakes. There’s an evolving range of issues that customers have raised that we haven’t addressed, but we’d like to address.
Cue: No. When you look back, like everything else, it’s easy to see the mistakes. Maps was a new area—not one where we have a lot of experience or expertise. ... Now that you understand the complexity of Maps, you realize that it was a relatively small team, and we kind of isolated them in their own little world. We completely underestimated the complexity of the product. If you think of Maps, it seems like it’s not that hard. All the roads are known, come on! All the restaurants are known. There’s Yelp and Open Table; they have all the addresses. Mail gets delivered; UPS has all the addresses. The mail arrives. FedEx arrives. You know, how hard is this? That was underestimating. And then there was the quality part, of how you test and validate— that is also a big issue. It’s an ongoing one. We’ve improved it significantly, and Google’s improved theirs significantly, but it’s still a problem that needs to be better. For both of us.
Cue: Siri is very different because it was new. When you’re doing something that hasn’t been done, it’s a very different animal. You’re trying to determine what are the features, what are the ways it can work, what are customers looking for, what are the things you can do that will improve the lives of customers. I think that’s still the case with Siri. If you look today, things like Cortana and Google exist, yet there’s still so much to do in that space. There are so many things you’d like Siri to do that it doesn’t do quite do yet.
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.
Federighi: We think in terms of experiences. We all use these devices every day, and we think about what we’d like them to do for us. Those aspirational experiences lead us down all sorts of roads technologically, to all kinds of problems that we need to solve. So we think, "Oh, we’d like your Watch to unlock your Mac," because we need to unlock our Macs every day. It doesn’t start with, "Hey, we’ve been doing development in wireless and they want something to use their technology for."
Cue: ... Steve was in your face screaming, and Tim is more quiet, more cerebral in his approach. But you have the same feeling. And when you disappoint Tim, even though he isn’t screaming at you, you get the same thing. [They both laugh knowingly.] That part comes through loud and clear.The thing I love about Tim, and the key to his success, is that he’s stayed true to himself, and never tried to be Steve. There are some qualities that he has that are better than Steve’s, and Steve had some qualities that are better than Tim’s. But he stayed true to what he is, and it's the best thing . He's made a lot of areas better and the areas where he’s not sure, he’s surrounded himself with people who do.