Mobile Me has shed a rather negative light on Apple in the last two weeks. What was aimed to be a tremendous product, seperating Apple even more from its competitors, instead turned out to be an extremely unreliable service. The shaky release sent the company and its customers into a tailspin of horrifying launch stories, downtime, lost messages, money, and a general misconception about their usually great customer support.
Because of the generally disastrous launch of Mobile Me, Apple has had no choice but to issue public statements, apology letters and increase the free trial times by 30 or 60 days. Steve Jobs has even requested demanded that an employee issue Mobile Me Status Updates every other day or so. The first status update issued by Apple reads as follows:
Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe, and I’m working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date. In the 14 days since we launched, it’s been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering. Be assured people here are working 24-7 to improve matters, and we’re going to favor getting you new info hot off the presses even if we have to post corrections or further updates later.
One issue we encountered was a mail outage affecting 1% of our members. Last Friday a serious problem with one of our mail servers blocked those members’ access to their MobileMe mail accounts. As of today a team was able to restore limited web access to those accounts so the affected members can use their browsers to read mail that has arrived since last Friday (though not before) as well as send and receive new mail. The team has already begun rolling out restoration of full access for all the accounts and expect to finish by the end of next week. We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10% of the messages received between July 16 and July 18.
The day we launched MobileMe, we had a lot more traffic to our servers than we anticipated, with the result that access to the web versions of the MobileMe applications — Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, iDisk — was temporarily unavailable. We’ve since added server capacity and tuned our software to scale better — i.e. behave more gracefully when traffic spikes. The team has also fixed over 70 bugs including one that was preventing MobileMe IMAP mail folders from syncing correctly between the web app and Mac OS X Mail or Outlook, plus others correcting display issues in Calendar and in general enhancing the performance of our web apps.
We’ll post another update later this weekend to report on status and hopefully further progress.
Hopefully the next update will say something like, “We’re sorry this took so long, but all systems are a go!”
