Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s so good. It is complete feature parity with Android Google Maps including turn-by-turn navigation. In many ways people think it was, at the time, better designed, better looking, better flow. Within two days, it is installed on over 10 million iOS devices. It is like a tall Google drink of water in a desert. Two quick personal stories on this. One, I remember the halls of Office for iPad or the Apex team at Microsoft World buzz when this came out because everyone is downloading it, everyone is analyzing their user interface paradigms. This was the first time that Google had really nailed that trade-off of distinctively Google but sensibly iOS. It was their first of many really great iOS apps that felt Google-y but also felt iPhone-y. All of us were tearing it apart and trying to understand, should we be taking cues from this in Office for iPad. The second fun personal story there is the team that built that app was actually Kirkland-based. It was Google Kirkland. It was a small team, I remember there are four core people on the team. I went to a presentation by them on how we built Google Maps for iOS three months after they launched it. They basically said, “Look at the whole API surface is already written for Android. We just needed to be really good iOS engineers and connect to the right services. Not that it wasn’t that hard but it actually was architected really nicely for us to just make an iPhone app that we just had to be objective C experts.” They really shows the power of all the work that Google has done to this point that just in the few months there they can make something really nice. Two things purported from Playbook and we can mention them again then but to talk about them in a moment. One, all of this episode just highlights people talk about Google being an engineering-driven organization and having incredible engineering resources and talent. This is it. Better than anyone else on the planet, nobody else could do this. Everything that they did with Maps over the now 15 years that it’s been around, the incredibly architected back-end and API surface, such that within three months, a team—that is an incredibly talented team—can build one of the best iOS applications in the world at that time and use this API back-end and not need to worry about it, and then ship it to the App Store and now, Google Maps is one of the most downloaded and installed iOS apps of all time. Pretty incredible.…

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