for the company's new maps application, which has been widely panned by
customers and reviewers alike as inferior to Google Maps ever since it
was introduced with iOS 6 a week and a half ago.
"At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that
deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch
of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are
extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we
are doing everything we can to make Maps better."
At first blush, it may have seemed like an insanely rare admission of
failure from a company that not only prides itself on being insanely
great, but insanely reluctant to concede its missteps. Yet, in the
post-Steve Jobs era, Apple's top executives appear to be making more
mistakes and to be more willing to admit them. In fact, Apple has
issued public apologies in each of the past three months of this year.
Apple's other public apologies this year
Back in July, the company made headlines for
withdrawing from the EPEAT
environmental rating system, which informs consumers whether
electronics manufacturers are making eco-friendly products. Apple
initially claimed that its own environmental standards were higher, but
after receiving a huge amount of backlash from consumers and
environmental groups, one of the company's top executives issued a
public apology.
Bob Mansfield, Apple's SVP of Mac Software Engineering and Hardware Engineering said:
We've recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who
were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the
EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting
today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.
Just those four words — "This was a mistake" — were enough to
surprise many of those covering the company, but it would only be a
few weeks before they'd see these words once more from Apple.
In August, Apple found itself apologising yet again after
multiple reports came out suggesting that the company had been cutting
back its retail store staff as part of an effort from the new SVP of
Retail John Browett to make the stores more profitable. The company
denied that this was tied to profitability, but still admitted these
changes were a mistake.
Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman, said in
a statement to Dow Jones afterwards:
"Making these changes was a mistake and the changes are
being reversed. Our employees are our most important asset and the ones
who provide the world-class service our customers deserve."
Why Apple is making more mistakes now
The recent string of mistakes and apologies may simply
reflect the reality that Apple has gotten a little sloppier as it
transitions from the Jobs Era to the Cook Era. According to Tim
Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, some things will
inevitably "fall through the cracks" as Apple continues to transition
to new management and figure out its path forward a little more than a
year after Jobs resigned from the company.
"They have to fill some pretty big shoes and find their own
way, in the sense that it's their company not Steve's anymore," Bajarin
told Mashable. "That is why ultimately I think you see Tim Cook
stepping up and admitting mistakes much earlier, rather than letting
them get completely out of hand."
Apple has made several other blunders in the past year under
Cook, and while it hasn't publicly apologised for these, it has moved
to clean them up quickly.
For starters, the company's Siri and Genius ad campaigns have
been criticised by many for abandoning some of the key elements that
made Apple commercials great. While Apple continues to air its
celebrity-drenched Siri commercials, the company was
quick to kill off its Genius ads
just a few days after they first aired during the Olympics, which was
seen as an admission of failure by some (though Apple's ad agency said
it was the plan all along.)
In another blunder, Apple released its own standalone podcast
app in July, which was quickly slammed by bloggers as poorly designed
and generally slow to load. The app was so bad that it had a 2.5 star
rating on iTunes for awhile after launching. After a month, Apple
responded to all the complaints by issuing
a big update to the app to make it work better.
Then, of course, there's Siri, which has been criticised for
its limitations pretty much since it launched with the iPhone 4S in
October of last year. In some ways, Siri's problems are the most
comparable to the new maps fiasco, in that both products were arguably
released as beta products (a word Apple hates to use) that improve the
more people use it. The difference, however, is that Siri was a new
feature whereas the maps application has been central to the iPhone
since it launched.
While Apple has never apologised for Siri, some close to the
company have slammed the product anonymously, with one ex-Apple insider
quoted in Fortune
as saying, "Steve [Jobs] would have lost his mind over Siri."
Apple screwed up under Steve Jobs, too
Indeed, it's become a popular refrain anytime Apple makes a
mistake with a product that it would never have happened under in the
Jobs' era. Yet, Siri was acquired and incorporated into the iPhone
while Jobs was still in control of the company.
What's more, even Jobs apologised for the company's mistakes
on occasion, albeit reluctantly. During the Antennagate controversy,
Jobs initially blamed customers for
holding the phone wrong, but after a few weeks of heavy criticism, Jobs
finally conceded, "We screwed up."
For the most part though, Jobs chose to rely more on his
so-called reality distortion field to persuade the media and the public
that he and the company were right, no matter what. Cook appears to
have a different leadership style, both because of differences between
the two CEOs' personalities and by virtue of the fact that Apple is
stumbling a bit more these days as part of the transition.
Bajarin says that he personally "cuts [Apple] a lot of slack"
because he is aware of how difficult it is for a big company to make a
transition in leadership. The real question, though, is whether
Apple's customers will be quite as forgiving.
