Apple Maps: Disaster or Simple Mistake?
No one likes to mess up, period. Apple is no exception to this rule. Apple prides itself on being at the bleeding edge in the technology wars that tablets are fighting in. Until recently, no company has been Apple’s equal in terms of getting products to market, creating demand bordering on hysteria, and just plain old fashioned beating the pants off the competition.
However, the folks at Apple had to feel humiliated when Tim Cook issued a public apology over the Apple Maps ordeal that left customers complaining about a poorly released product. With the amount of information available today, and the ease and rapidness in which bad news can spread, minor glitches can quickly become major disasters.
What was just a simple error was made worse by Apple when the company first announced that the product was the best map application available.
Though I agree on the grander scale this didn’t help Apple, it didn’t hurt it much either, though some may disagree as this discussion board shows. A blogger on Barron’s agrees with me that this is not the disaster everyone is making this out to be.
We know there are more than two sides to this incident, as the many opinions written after its aftermath highlight. A writer for TPM Idea Lab calls the mistake a “Mapocalypse,” while a Business Insider writer says this foul-up will leave a big mark on Scott Forstall, the senior vice president of iPhone software at Apple.
Where does this leave us? Has this map ordeal caused irreparable harm to Apple and its goodwill with consumers? An Information Week article on research that was done after the release of Apple Maps says consumers were barely phased. Another article on News Today Digest cites additional research that showed that this maps disaster has not affected people’s opinion of Apple.
At the end of the day, I think we can draw some conclusions from this. Was this bad for Apple? Yes. This definitely was not what they had hoped for. Does it rise to the level of game changer for the corporation? Probably not as much as some would say.
When I last checked Apple’s stock price, it was valued at over $620 as of October 15, 2012, with a market cap of $600 billion dollars and growth expectations over 60 percent the next year and 25 percent the next five years. Apple is doing fine.
