I can't speak for the Maps team because I'm not involved, and I can't speak for Google because, well, I can't speak for my employer. But I've been a developer in very similar situations before, and here's what pops into my mind when I hear statements like this:
The team has been pushing hard to get the new functionality out the door. They are perhaps behind schedule, nobody has yet looked at IE, and then someone finally gets their hands on a Windows 8 phone to test. It doesn't work. The product manager makes the call: cut IE support so that the Webkit version can launch on time. A redirect's put in place to avoid serving a completely broken experience to Windows 8 users, so they can at least do a search for businesses instead of having it not work.
They launch, the press picks it up, and conspiracy theories start flying. Somebody pages the team, emails start flying, there's a huddle to figure out how to fix it. An engineer (or a few engineers) "donate" their weekend to fixing IE compatibility. They work day and night until the bugs are fixed, and then remove the redirect.
PR makes a statement, and then another one once the problem can be fixed. Like all PR statements, they try to say the minimum amount possible to calm people down, since everything they do say will get picked apart by the press. They aren't engineers, they know only what the engineers tell them, and they say even less because whatever the engineers say will get wildly distorted as it passes from engineer -> PM -> PR -> press -> Hacker News.
Just my humble conjecture, as an engineer who's been in this situation several times before at a few different organizations (both Google and otherwise). I'd think critically before reaching for pitchforks, though.
The team has been pushing hard to get the new functionality out the door. They are perhaps behind schedule, nobody has yet looked at IE, and then someone finally gets their hands on a Windows 8 phone to test. It doesn't work. The product manager makes the call: cut IE support so that the Webkit version can launch on time. A redirect's put in place to avoid serving a completely broken experience to Windows 8 users, so they can at least do a search for businesses instead of having it not work.
They launch, the press picks it up, and conspiracy theories start flying. Somebody pages the team, emails start flying, there's a huddle to figure out how to fix it. An engineer (or a few engineers) "donate" their weekend to fixing IE compatibility. They work day and night until the bugs are fixed, and then remove the redirect.
PR makes a statement, and then another one once the problem can be fixed. Like all PR statements, they try to say the minimum amount possible to calm people down, since everything they do say will get picked apart by the press. They aren't engineers, they know only what the engineers tell them, and they say even less because whatever the engineers say will get wildly distorted as it passes from engineer -> PM -> PR -> press -> Hacker News.
Just my humble conjecture, as an engineer who's been in this situation several times before at a few different organizations (both Google and otherwise). I'd think critically before reaching for pitchforks, though.