Also, because SYNC is not connected to the internet it does not have an always on connection. SYNC uses data over voice. Think old school dial up internet connection. SYNC, however, dialed into a partner company that provided a strict set of customer experienced data like ball scores, get your horoscope, etc...
So to update maps, requires you to plug an update stick into the USB port. MAPs are also very large data and would take too long to update on a dial up connection. Again, it has WIFI but the WIFI is not internally used by SYNC or wasn't when I was on the program.
Secondly, because of the partnership with INRIX, I think INRIX gets some kickback for maps updates. And after the trial period, if you decide to keep traffic and direction subscription, I think INRIX also got a kickback for that too.
It will be interesting to see where SYNC goes in the future with 4G now available. When I was at Ford, they wanting to have a celluar data service that was vendor agnostic but it gave them problems for 911 assist. Maybe that has improved.
My point is that there are a whole host of problems a first mover has to over come. Yea they made some mistakes but dam, you have to give them credit for being one of the first to start putting some of this out there.
What about updating the maps over the diagnostic connector? You'd just send over the deltas, obviously.