The Worm in Apple

A statue of Steve Jobs in Hungary.

I think the new maps app on Apple's iOS6 is now officially as disaster. The coverage of my own home town area in Eastern Ontario is totally weird, showing towns that are not there, mislocating others by dozens of kilometers. And yeah, it's pretty.

I think this bodes ill for Apple in future, and I think it was predictable. Steve Jobs really was the indispensable man.

He was, they say, a difficult man to work for. He was a demanding perfectionist. Good enough was never good enough.

Precisely because of this management style, now that he is gone, there is bound to be a snap-back. While the cat's away ... A lot of guys near the top at Apple are going to be thinking, in their heart of hearts, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God A'mighty, free at last!” They are going to make a point of being slapdash, of cutting those corners, and it is going to be very difficult to rein them in.

And Tim Cook, even if he is not himself among their number, is not going to have the personal authority to do it.

Now is the time for all good people to dump their Apple stock.

If I had any, I'd put my money right now into Google and Amazon. They're the guys who are best positioned to take advantage of Apple's decline. And they have the management to do it.