Comment by notahacker
10 years ago
I think the Apple Maps example is even more questionable. Apple didn't fail because moving "up the stack" meant they had no idea what consumers wanted from a mapping service; that's absurd. They didn't fail because they didn't have the expertise to write usable software either.
They failed because they didn't throw enough resources at something that wasn't that strategically important to them.
(cf. their entry into the music distribution business, a brand new "up the stack" market which was of huge strategic importance to them, where they ended up assessing customers' needs better than the existing players in that space)
I suppose it depends what you mean by "usable".
Apple Maps certainly had serious quality issues at launch. Whether they considered building a mapping app to be easier than building an OS, I have no idea. I am sure that many at Apple were under no such illusions. But it was a product made for purely corporate strategy reasons.
Google puts as much effort into their phones as Apple puts into their maps, and vice versa, with predictable results.