tjordhei

brakken said:

Completely agree. Nice work, DED.
If there is an AppleCar in the works, I assume Maps would have to improve beyond imagination!
I really hope Apple keeps commercialisation as a consequence of making great products, not the cause.
I continue to look forward to Apple's and DED's future excellent contributions!

I also completely agree.  Well written and perfectly on point, DED.  I've been leading software teams, albeit on a small scale within a non-tech company, for 35 years and I am repeatedly astonished at how little Apple accomplishes each year on the software and services front (outside of their core OS products; I don't feel qualified to assess Swift) given their immense resources and presumably world-class talent.  15-20 years ago, I assumed they purposely under-achieved in those areas to avoid the appearance or reality of competing with the software firms they desperately needed and wanted to develop for their platforms.  Those days are long gone, however.  They still need firms like Adobe and Microsoft to create their suites to run well on apple hardware, for sure.  And, they've got them.  But the real key to winning from a platform perspective is Maps, Siri, Photos, iCloud and Apple Music.  In their current for, compared to offerings from Google, Dropbox and Microsoft, all of these suck.  Siri - I personally have gotten a 5% success rate at best with what I would consider bread-and-butter inquiries in the past 3 years.  Why would anyone even want Siri hands free in its current state?  My daughter, who's a very successful Yelp employee, super digitally savvy and passionate about music - someone I'd consider a member of the prototypical Apple Music target market - told me this week that after buying Apple Music and using it side-by-side versus Spotify for a few months, that Apple Music is useless and she's cancelling her subscription.  Photos and iCloud I barely dare to try to explain and defend to my wife who is a member of the Apple target market of "it just works" people.  And Maps - well, I can't say it any better than DED.  Of course, I'm sure we all realize that Cook and his team know we're all folks who are deeply committed to the Apple ecosystems and have been for years.  I just hope that doesn't mean they take our comments for granted.  I got into IT in the late 70's when IBM ruled the roost and I have always remembered overhearing the IBM rep for our account (a medium-sized insurance company is where I worked at the time) at Christmas-time 1979 yelling (yes yelling) at our infrastructure lead for not going thru with some hardware purchase he imagined we needed to do.  That was for me the epitome of hubris and it left a bad taste in my mouth re IBM for 20 years.  As soon as I had buying authority, I went with Dell and others.  Apple - especially given they're only 10 years out of the wilderness of being a nearly-irrelevant tech firm - shouldn't be resting on any laurels and should be using a sizeable fraction of their cash flow to focus intensively on improving the service offerings this forum discussion has highlighted.