By J. Scott Anderson
Google’s Street View is everywhere, including places that I wish it wasn’t. But it is a useful tool that help to familiarize you with a strange area before you ever go there. Maybe you are looking to relocate to a new part of the country and you are evaluating homes to buy. Street View lets you take a virtual drive around the neighborhood and get a feel for it.
Apple promised a better Street View with their Look Around feature for Apple Maps when it was introduced. And, it did operate better–in my opinion–than Google Maps Street View. The problem is that it, other Apple Map features, only work in certain high population areas. Basically, if you don’t live in an Apple blessed urban environment, you don’t exist to Apple.
Why is this? I can’t seem to find a legitimate reason. Could it be a lack of funding? I doubt it…Apple is flush with more cash than most if not all of the dictators around the world…combined. Talent? I doubt it, the tech is built already and now just needs execution. Privacy? This is a possible one, but as Google has proved, the technology is there to protect faces and license plates. Besides, the smaller cities and suburban and rural areas they are neglecting won’t have as many people’s faces to redact.
So…why hasn’t Apple expanded Look Around and 3d views of other, if not all areas? Why roll out a feature and tease it to millions, only to let it die on the vine? I don’t have the answer. Do you?
It must be because of a comination of arrogance and self over-appreciation.
Watever they do, their maps app will be a shallow thing and never become the index to the world’s vastest and most elaborated database of businesses, tourism, geological and other data. As GOO has – and nobody else.