\ABS\Auto Blog Samurai\data\Stakk Money Ent.\Technology Feed\10poguespost-googlemaps-blog480.png)
Google Map’s new directory buttons.
Our story so far: Last September, Apple decided to dump the Google Maps app that had been on the iPhone for years. Apple replaced it with its own Maps app — software with so many problems that Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, apologized and even recommended that people use other apps until Apple could fix its own one.
In December — incredibly quickly — Google responded by introducing its own Maps app for iPhone. It’s a spectacular app, among the best apps ever written. It’s fast, beautiful and so good at guessing what you mean when you start typing a destination, it’s almost mind reading. You can read the details here.
Today, that delightful news gets even better. Not only has Google improved Google Maps for iPhone, it’s also brought that same free app to three machines that never had it: the iPad, Android phones and Android tablets. (The Android versions are available for download today; it requires the Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean version of Android — recent versions, in other words. The iOS versions will be available shortly.)
For Androidians, the biggest news is the design of the app itself. It’s modeled on the iPhone app, the one that’s simple and fast and elegant. It’s also uncluttered by the morass of menus that have always plagued the existing Maps app for Android.
But for practitioners of all religions — tablet, phone, iOS, Android — the other news is the new features that today’s new version brings. They include:
* Greater speed. All app versions are faster than before.
* Better place information. Half the time, you don’t even need navigation instructions; you just use Google Maps as the world’s smartest Yellow Pages, to find a nearby restaurant, movie theater, drugstore or whatever.
The details for found places now include a one-line description (“Chinese restaurant famous for dim sum”); a five-star rating system (including a decimal — “4.3,” for example — because, let’s face it, almost everything these days winds up with a four-star rating); the ability to upload your own photos of a place; and a more complete integration of the Zagat guides, which Google bought.
* Greater emphasis on exploration. Google Maps has always excelled at getting you to a known destination. But Google now wants the app to help you choose a restaurant, bar, store, recreation center or hotel, at least in major United States and European cities.
If you tap in the Search box without typing anything, new, photographic buttons appear: Eat, Drink, Shop, Play, Sleep. Each opens lists of corresponding facilities, sorted by criteria like Local Favorites, Popular with Tourists and so on. (Google says that these recommendations are never paid placement.)
* Traffic incidents and auto-rerouting. At last: Google Maps shows more than colored lines indicating current traffic speeds on major roads. Now it also displays tiny icons that represent accidents and construction. Tap one to read the details: “Right lane blocked on 680,” for example. (In case you were wondering, the information on traffic incidents doesn’t come from Waze, the traffic-incident app that Google recently bought. That data has yet to be incorporated into Maps.)
Better yet: Maps now looks ahead for traffic jams on your route, and interrupts your drive with a dialog box that offers to route you around it (if the new path would be quicker, of course). On its own.
* Offline maps. This feature is something of an Easter egg. It’s undocumented, a feature inserted by Google engineers simply because they wanted it. You can access it only if you know the secret. But wow, is it worth it.
This feature memorizes the map data for whatever area is displayed on your screen right now (up to a whole city in size). That way, you can use Google Maps even when you’re overseas and don’t want to turn on data roaming (because that’s insanely expensive), or when you’re in an area where there’s no cell reception. It’s very handy.
To capture a map snapshot like this, tap in the Search box. Use the speech-recognition button and say, “OK Maps.” (It’s a riff on the command “OK Glass” that prepares Google Glass, the company’s “smart headband,” for voice commands.)
A message quietly lets you know you’ve successfully stored the displayed area.
*Nice tablet layouts. On a tablet, Maps really shines. The app smartly reformats itself to take best advantage of whatever screen shape you have: two or three columns of place listings, for example, and luxuriously displayed photos and reviews for each business.
This new, improved Maps app works identically on both major flavors of phone and tablet. You know what? I don’t care how much you distrust Google and its motives. This is crazy good software, some the best work Google has ever done.
\ABS\Auto Blog Samurai\data\Stakk Money Ent.\Technology Feed\19bits-hopstop-articleInline.png)
Hopstop’s iPhone app.\ABS\Auto Blog Samurai\data\Stakk Money Ent.\Technology Feed\12microsoft-strip-articleLarge.jpg)
From left: Jeff Chiu/AP; Microsoft; Stuart Isett for The NYT; Kevin P. Casey for The NYT; Noah Berger for The NYTAmong the executives named at Microsoft in the reorganization of the company are, from left; Julie Larson-Green, Terry Myerson, Qi Lu, Satya Nadella and Tony Bates. SEATTLE — A couple of years ago, a satirical set of diagrams depicting the organization of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and other technology companies made the rounds on the Internet. The chart for Microsoft showed several isolated pyramids representing its divisions, each with a cartoon pistol aimed at the other. \ABS\Auto Blog Samurai\data\Stakk Money Ent.\Technology Feed\bits-logo-75.jpg){kind=logo}
News from the technology industry, including start-ups, the Internet, enterprise and gadgets.\ABS\Auto Blog Samurai\data\Stakk Money Ent.\Technology Feed\MICROSOFT-articleInline.jpg)
“To execute, we’ve got to move from multiple Microsofts to one Microsoft,” Steven A. Ballmer, the longtime chief executive, said of the new arrangement. Its divisions will war no more, Microsoft said on Thursday. The company said it would dissolve its eight product divisions in favor of four new ones arranged around broader functional themes, a change meant to encourage a tighter marriage among technologies as competitors like Apple and Google outflank it in the mobile and Internet markets. “To execute, we’ve got to move from multiple Microsofts to one Microsoft,” Steven A. Ballmer, the longtime chief executive, said in an interview. The notion of organizing the company around the trinity of modern technology products — software, hardware and services — is most famously used by Apple. It is yet another sign of how deeply Apple’s way of doing things has seeped into every pore of the technology industry. And in the process, some of the biggest technology companies are starting to look much more alike organizationally. The goal is to get thousands of employees to collaborate more closely, to avoid some duplication and, as a result, to build their products to work more harmoniously together. “The current model is obviously Apple, given how phenomenally successful they have been,” said Kevin Werbach, an associate professor of business at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “What Apple has been great at is creating these experiences.” The changes at Microsoft, a giant in the tech industry for decades that has stalled in the last few years, echo similar moves at its biggest rivals, including some tweaking at Apple. Craig Federighi, who led the development of Apple’s operating system for computers, was also given oversight of much of the operating system for iPhones and iPads. Jonathan Ive, the industrial designer behind the slick look of Apple hardware, took charge of the interface of Apple software. At Google, the development of operating systems for mobile devices and computers was put into the hands of a single executive, Sundar Pichai, rather than two. Microsoft said on Thursday that it, too, would consolidate its major operating systems, including Windows, Windows Phone and the software that powers the Xbox, under Terry Myerson, who handled engineering only for Windows Phone before. The underlying goal is to create software with tighter linkages to power an array of devices, making it easier for people to use their smartphones, tablets and game consoles as adjuncts to one another. But Microsoft’s charges are far more sweeping and involve many more people. “This is, in my mind, the biggest thing we’ve ever done,” said Lisa Brummel, a 24-year Microsoft veteran who leads its human resources department, noting that the company has nearly 100,000 employees. It remains to be seen whether more cohesive teamwork, if that is what results from all the movement, will offer the spark that has been missing recently from so many of Microsoft’s products. The company remains one of the most lucrative enterprises on the planet, with nearly $17 billion in profit during its last fiscal year on $73.7 billion in revenue. But it has been widely faulted for being late with compelling products in two lucrative categories, smartphones and tablets. Its Bing search engine is a distant second to Google and loses billions of dollars a year for Microsoft. Rivalries among the Microsoft divisions have built up over time, sometimes resulting in needless duplication of efforts. Microsoft managers often grumble privately that one of the most dreaded circumstances at the company is having to “take a dependency” on another group for a piece of software, placing them at the mercy of someone else’s development schedule. Product development groups will sometimes go to great lengths to avoid this, creating software like e-mail programs that duplicate the functions of other products at Microsoft. While its old divisions all had their own finance and marketing organizations, Microsoft is now centralizing those functions. 
