Are Bing Maps this horrible? Couldn't they license those if they didn't have a choice? Or what about MapQuest? What about the maps used by GPS units? Couldn't they have made a deal with Garmin or Tomtom or someone like that? It may have taken more work than integration with Google, but it'd almost definitely take less work than starting from scratch. I definitely do not believe that their hands were tied and they were forced into creating their own shoddy, incomplete system.
On top of all that, I think Google has more business intelligence than to actually let the contract for iOS maps go. Maybe both sides were just bluffing and never thought the one party would cut the other loose, or something like that, but you'd think with a deal this big at some point someone would come back with their tail between their legs and reopen negotiations.
Of course, it's all speculation at this point anyway. It'd be nice if someone with knowledge could come in here and elucidate, though the likelihood of that is really small.
Last I heard, Bing was contracting out to Nokia for their maps, as part of the whole Nokia-Microsoft strategic surrend^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpartnership.
(And I know that for all its faults, Nokia is smart enough to apply human QA to their mapping system, because in my last job I worked on the Web site that those human contractors used.)
> What about the maps used by GPS units? Couldn't they have made a deal with Garmin or Tomtom or someone like that?
They have made a deal with Tomtom (teleatlas).
Concerning Garmin, they don't do maps but use navteq (a subsidiary of nokia). Apple should probably have bought nokia, they would have acquired the best mobile maps technology.
I'm not sure what all that deal entails, so it's hard to say whether it could have been better executed upon, other than to say it's clearly not ready yet. I find it hard to believe, however, that all of the incorrect placement of destinations and, in some cases, even the inclusion of destinations that have not existed for decades, also occur in TomTom's car navigation systems.
TomTom is pretty good at directing you to a street address but is just terrible in terms of finding local destinations. I did a ~2000 mile road trip a few months ago and several times that I was looking for something specific I couldn't find it or found the wrong thing using TomTom. It turned out the best workflow was to look something up in Google Maps, get the address from Google, type that address into TomTom, and let TomTom direct me to that address.
One can always use http://routes.tomtom.com/ as a source for comparison. It would also be good if certain journalists and bloggers did this before shooting their mouths off about data quality, but that wouldn't make a compelling headline.
From the article "2. I suspect that the data and routing functionality that they have from TomTom, while not the best, is simply not the source of their problems. ..."
The author of the article is suggesting the problem is the integration of lots of other data in with the TomTom data is the problem. Not the TomTom data
On top of all that, I think Google has more business intelligence than to actually let the contract for iOS maps go. Maybe both sides were just bluffing and never thought the one party would cut the other loose, or something like that, but you'd think with a deal this big at some point someone would come back with their tail between their legs and reopen negotiations.
Of course, it's all speculation at this point anyway. It'd be nice if someone with knowledge could come in here and elucidate, though the likelihood of that is really small.