Soon-to-step down Apple CEO Tim Cook say the faulty 2012 launch of Apple Maps was his “first really big mistake” in the role, according to a Bloomberg report covering Tuesday’s “all-hands” town hall meeting that was held Tuesday.
The Apple Maps app launched with mislabeled landmarks, faulty directions, and a bad user experience when compared to Google Maps at the time. “The product wasn’t ready, and we thought it was because we were testing more of local kind of stuff,” Cook told staff.
“We apologized for it, and we said, ‘Go use these other apps. They’re better than ours.’ And that was some humble pie,” Cook said. “But it was the right thing for our users. And so it’s an example of keeping the user at the center of the decisions that we made.”
Cook added: “Now we’ve got the best map app on the planet. We learned about persistence, and we did exactly the right thing having made the mistake.”
The fallout over the botched Maps launch resulted in the firing of software chief Scott Forstall – a close Steve Jobs collaborator.
As for his proudest moment at Apple, Cook said the Apple Watch and its expanding health features as the work he’s most proud of.
While Cook admitted that his list of mistakes would be “extraordinary in length” (the list would most assuredly include the long delayed, then cancelled AirPower charging mat, as well as Apple’s cancelled car project). However, Cook was able to avoid the kind of well-publicized product recalls and cancellations suffered by other companies in the industry for the last 15 years.
(Image of Tim Cook was generated by Google Gemini. As far as we know, he has never publicly made the “who knows?” gesture.)
