As you probably know by know, when Apple Computer Corporation released the newest version of their mobile operating system, iOS 6 last week, the mapping application was broken.  Spectacularly broken.  Loses train station, shrinks tower, and creates new airport broken.  Slideshows of ridiculous glitches broken.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple apologizes broken.

How did this happen?

A Quick Dose of Reality

Apple Computer launched a major upgrade of it’s operating system across an entire family of mobile devices – iPhone, iPod, and iPad.    The upgrade took ~600MB and was one-click easy.  Devices sensed an upgrade needed to happen, told the user, and upgraded themselves without a hitch.

Of all the major supported to apps on the system, only one fell down: Maps.

Meanwhile, on the PC side, most of my friends don’t both to do operating system upgrades.  They purchase a new computer with the new operating system, or, more likely, limp along on the old OS until they can no longer limp, then purchase a new computer, because the process is just that painful.

All of this tempest over Maps tells me one thing: Location and Direction Applications are now mission critical.

Maps Are Now Mission Critical

Ten years ago, a few forward thinking friends would have a GPS in the car.  If they got lost, they could open the GPS, type in the address, and get directions.  A few years after that, maps started to appear in cell phones.  At the time, I thought this was mostly due to digital convergence (“and it’s a camera too!” / “and it’s a Personal Digital Assistant!” / “And it does email!” / “And it …”)

Over time, people began to rely on these, to the point that they don’t both to get print directions at all; just fire up the iPhone and drive. I confess, after I got my latest iPhone, I’ve done this a time or two.  Now, all of a sudden, these apps go from optional to having to work.

That said, it is king of strange that maps fell down in iOS 6 – the errors look more like data errors than software glitches.  Why would that cause a problem?

Only because Apple replaced the underlying engine driving the software, switching out Google Maps for their own.

This wasn’t an incremental release of iOS maps; it was an entirely new engine.

And there’s one secret that folks might not know about mapping applications.

With traditional applications, you can develop examples (“tests”) up front, and require your programmers to have them passing before the application is passed off to a group that will test the application like a user.  Maps are different.

Testing Mapping Applications is Incredibly Hard

With Map software, there is a second unknown: The data underneath the application can have a problem, and that problem can require massive amounts of late-stage test and evaluation.  Here’s James Whittaker, then a engineering director at Google, talking about that problem (advanced to 19 minutes in by me):

Whittaker gives examples in Google Maps at the time.  Whittaker asks for a walking route from Cambridge to Hall, England, that requires swimming the English Channel – twice. In another example, he shows Arlington National Cemetery, with an icon above it indicating the facility is a resturant.

Again, mapping data need to be scrubbed, and, without massive peer review, ‘unclean’ data purchased from multiple sources and combined in likely to  be a mess.  It took Google years (and lots and lots of temporary and contract workers) to sort out the issues in Google Maps — the main point of Whittakers talk is that, despite the automation rhetoric, manual testers still play a critical role in application development.

To give you some idea of how long this process was, keep in mind: Google Maps went public in 2005 and Dr Whittaker gave his talk five years later, in 2010.

All of the publicity around these problems actually give me hope.

I hope that we are slowly transitioning from a ‘let the users find the bugs’/Facebook/Twitter world (what James Bach calls “Quality is Dead“) to one where companies recognize certain applications as critical, and give test and quality the attention it deserves.

Mapping Applications are mission critical, and there is a chance they might actually be treated that way in the future.

What else is mission critical that we are not treating that way as a society — and how can we change it?

Men and women of greater writing talent and skill than I have written eulogies for Steve Jobs.  Some have been touching and inspirational; others knew him, or his companies, far better than I.  It would be more than a little pretentious for me to try to write an article that, at best, might be a bit of a copy of what has come before.

And that’s good, because that ain’t this article.

Instead of talking about what Mr. Jobs did, I’d like to talk about what made him different, and how, in our own way, we can be different too.

The Heart of the Matter is that Steve Jobs was a thief and a failure.

He was good at it.

You should be too.

Thief

I have recently heard that Steve Jobs created the personal computer, the windowed operating system, the mouse, and, though this was more implied, that he invented the Ethernet port of a personal computer in the NeXT workstation.

At best, you might say he popularized those inventions.  The GUI, Ethernet, personal computer, and Mouse all came from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center – (PARC).  Jobs didn’t invent the ideas as much as steal them.  In fact, Xerox’s original personal computer, the Alto, launched in 1973; Jobs saw it demo of it in 1979 and later offere Xerox $1 Million Dollars in Apple pre-IPO Stock in order to get a three day tour of PARC technologies, along with a few key staffers.

Of course Jobs is know for capitalizing on ideas — MP3 Players, Cell Phones, and Tablet Computers all existed before the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.  What many people do not realize is how Steve Jobs got into consumer electronics – by building blue boxes, little devices that trick a pay phone into thinking you had deposited money when you actually had not, allowing you to make “free” phone calls.

No doubt about it, Jobs was a thief.  You might say the master thief, but a thief.

Failure

A college drop-out, a multiple-time, multiple-type drug user, Jobs grabbed a position at Atari by misrepresenting his experience, then smelled so bad he had to work the night shift.  The night shift had an advantage, though, in that Steve could bring in his friend, Steve Wozniak, to do the actual programming, because, well, Jobs couldn’t do it himself.  (In one bit of fairly well-documented history, he offered to split the pay for finishing the game “breakout” with Wozniak … then lied about how much the total actually was.) Fired by his own company at the age of thirty, Jobs went on to start NeXT, which would have gone out of business if it hadn’t been acquired by Apple.  That acquisition led to Job’s second chance at the CEO role.

Shortly after taking over as CEO of Apple in 1998, Jobs killed a hand-held personal digital assistant called the Apple Newton.  A year previously, a small spin-off company launched a similar product called the “Palm Pilot.”

Palm Computer would go public in 2000.

The Whole Picture

You can’t have Steve Jobs without his ‘vices.’  Those vices are a part of who he was, and instrumental to his success.

Yes, he took ideas and built on them.  That’s great.  Outside of academia, no one cares if you solve the deep technical program in a weekend poring over obtuse manuals, or in three minutes with a google query, or by turning to the person two cubes over and asking for some advice.  We care about outcome.

When it came to outcome, Steve Jobs delivered.

He took good ideas others failed to execute on, combined them with ideas from other places (like industrial design), and perservered.  As a manager, he found great talent, kept is around, and put it to good use.

Likewise, I learned a lesson from Steve Jobs about failure.

Failure is okay.

It’s alternative — only betting on “sure things” — is the road to mediocrity.  Sure, you might just snag a 5% raise moving across the street from ComputerMegaInc to MegaGlobalCom, but you’ll never win big.

If you want to win big, you’ll have to take risks, and that might just mean failure.

So take a lot of risks — but smart ones. Failure enough times, and you might just win big once.  (And it only takes once.)

Tomorrow

Plenty of people have written about Steve Jobs virtues, and what we can learn from them.  Yes, he was doggedly persistent.  Yes, he recognized and promoted great talent.  Yes, he was decisive, and the list goes on and on.

I am more interested in his weaknesses, and how he overcame them, in many cases turning those weaknesses into strengths.

Yes, Steve Jobs was a thief and a failure, but in the best sense of those terms.

So go out there and fail!

I know I will.