Apple had tremendously grand plans for the launch of Mobile Me. However, being a little too ambitious is not something the company considers a fault. Until now.
“I have no kind words for .Mac, Apple’s online service that had its identity erased and replaced with the MobileMe brand on July 11. The .Mac service never worked quite right for me, and I was looking forward to its successor,” Glenn Fleisman reports for the Seattle Times.
So were we.
“MobileMe offers a reduced set of services for the same $99 per year but promised Microsoft Exchange-like synchronization for contacts, e-mail and events, as well as snappy and modern Web applications for a far better experience when away from your desktop or iPhone/iPod touch applications.” Fleisman continues to explain that “Instead of a clean launch, I and reportedly hundreds of thousands of .Mac subscribers had days of problems. And even when resolved, the problems left what Apple describes as 1 percent of its e-mail users adrift from e-mail for 10 days.”
Fleisman isn’t the only one who’s dealt with these disastrous issues. The non-official Apple slogan “It Just Works” simply can’t be applied to this past July 9th. Launching the App Store, iPhone 3G, Mobile Me and the iPhone 2.0 Software might have just been a little too much for the company to handle.
Fleisman continues to corrolate last year’s Leopard launch to this year’s shotty launch, claiming that Apple is simply too busy to focus on any one thing. “Leopard wasn’t the only stutter. In February, the company released its Time Capsule backup and Wi-Fi gateway appliance that works directly with Leopard’s Time Machine backup system. The bugs in that first release had to be patched through a massive set of updates three weeks later, indicating the device was released prematurely.”
While this may seem true and easy to believe, Apple’ closed and secretive environment denies them the ability to ask partners for help, (think Google ladies and gentlemen).
“The .Mac Web site was nearly or completely unusable from the night of July 9 until the early morning of July 12, although most independent parts, like iDisk disk sharing, kept functioning. Existing iPhone owners who upgraded to the 2.0 software and new iPhone 3G purchasers all needed to authorize the new software through Apple servers. Despite predictions that AT&T would have problems with this, Apple was the one that buckled. Some users found their old or new phones unusable for several hours July 11.”
“Apple said a few days ago in an e-mail to its MobileMe members — e-mail that 1 percent of members couldn’t receive, of course — that nearly all trial and paid subscriptions as of mid-July would have 30 days tacked on to their expiration to make up in part for the glitches. But for a company that has been long focused on what its customers need, Apple needs to take a long, hard look at how hard it’s pushing its employees — and how little polish seems to be left on the company’s image right now.”
I would definitely like to end this post with a sentence like, “Don’t worry, they’ll work it out.” However, as days pass, I am beginning to wonder when the magical solution or avalanche of bug fixes is going to be released.
Full article here.
2 Comments to “Surprise, Surprise; Mobile Me Still Considered a Disaster”
Um, while the transition has been a train wreck, what you have to look at is how Apple handles SaaS when the service has been stabilized. In the year before MobileMe was rolled out, dotMac mostly worked, with random rolling outages occurring on a weekly basis, and with Apple blowing off concerns with poor throughput from Europe.
There is no reason to believe Apple won’t fix the most egregious problems soon, but once the system is stabilized, I fully expect to go back to the dotMac level of support/uptime. That is, the system will mostly work, most of the time, but with random outages and poor feedback as to when any given problem will be fixed.
Personally, I think that level of support is not worth it for free, let alone $100/year for dotMac services. But with all the ‘push’ services in MobileMe, it’s even more worthless. What exactly is the point of instant push when you can’t count on the service being up?
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@ Dave: Apple made all these claims about Flash being useless. Then they come out and say that “everything Flash does can be done with other technologies, like AJAX.”
While they’re right, when they were saying this, they hadn’t put their money where their mouth is. Until Mobile Me. S
So, Mobile Me was supposed to be Apple’s showcase of why they BANNED Flash, as well as a major overhaul to Mobile Me.
So to answer your question Dave…”What exactly is the point of instant push when you can’t count on the service being up?”
I don’t think Apple counted on the service being down like it has been. If anything, they are wracking their brains on how to fix this disastrous “over-ambitious” launch.
Either way though, I sincerely hope that Apple is working around the clock to fix these issues.
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