Chuq von Rospach, a former Apple employee who worked behind the scenes on Apple’s email lists, for a very, very long time, spills the beans on what it’s like to work for Eddy Cue, the new head of the Mobile Me team, who is reporting directly to Steve Jobs.
The following is taken from Chuq von Rospach’s post explaining some of the Mobile Me launch disaster situation, as well as attempting to debunk the Leaked Internal Email written by Steve Jobs to the Mobile Me team we reported about yesterday.
Rospach: I expect a bunch of friends and people I know were involved in that project, and I feel really bad for them. But the reality is, the thing wasn’t ready and the release got botched. And Steve and Apple aren’t terribly tolerant of that kind of major screwup. I expect heads have rolled and there are a few tanned hides waiting for the welts to go away.
Excerpt from Steve’s Email: “It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” he says. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”
Rospach:There are two aspects to this. Steve is absolutely right — but also remember that ultimately, it was Steve’s call to go live (or not). he’s never been afraid to say “this ain’t ready” and pull something from release; his rehearsals for MacWorld Keynotes are legendary (and sometimes brutal), and stuff literally has disappeared in the last 24 hours, if he wasn’t satisfied with it.
So Steve has some responsibility here a swell, but with a caveat: someone he depended on to tell him what reality was told him it was ready to roll, and Steve believed him. And whoever told him that was wrong, and made everyone (including Steve and Apple) look bad. That’s not a good way to advance your career at Apple.
That this release was botched isn’t about Apple not having a clue, but about the MobileMe people either blowing it (I can think of any number of scenarios — scaling it hard). The ultimate failure seemed to be more capacity planning mistakes than anything else, if I’m guessing right. but the ultimate failure was not being willing to tell Steve “we aren’t ready” and taking that heat. They thought they could release and make it work, and guessed very wrong (or thought they were in good shape, which is worse).
Some areas of Apple “run their own show”, effectively using Apple’s IT datacenters as a hosting facilities. Others build and operate within Apple’s IT infrastructure. One of the groups that basically runs its own IT outside of Apple’s core IT group is Eddy Cue’s group — because of the way stuff Eddy is in charge of gets built and managed.
Eddy’s name isn’t familiar to most apple people, but he’s in his way as important to apple’s success as Jonathan Ives. His specialty: the back-end infrastructures that make Apple’s online universe tick. His groups did the Apple online store, iTools (later .Mac), iTunes store, etc, etc. It’s the not-sexy part of the company, but it’s the guts that make all of the sexy front ends actually work.
I’m actually amazed that Eddy hasn’t been poached by a startup, much as I’m amazed that Tim Cook hasn’t been poached — but the reality is that if you survive and become one of Steve’s inner core of people he trusts (and that ain’t easy) — you tend to stay. Apple doesn’t generally get poached by startups or other places at the exec level often, anyone notice?
Rospach’s thoughts on Eddy Cue, Mobile Me’s head honcho, who reports directly to Steve Jobs.
I’m actually amazed that Eddy hasn’t been poached by a startup, much as I’m amazed that Tim Cook hasn’t been poached — but the reality is that if you survive and become one of Steve’s inner core of people he trusts (and that ain’t easy) — you tend to stay. Apple doesn’t generally get poached by startups or other places at the exec level often, anyone notice?
A lot of that is because it’s not easy working for Steve, but if you can do it, you get to do really great stuff, and that’s addictive. trust me. you just don’t see people running off from apple to CEO a startup the way you do Yahoo or Google, not out of the top few levels of the company.
Eddy’s real specialty is to be able to take what Steve asks for, implement it, hit the target dates, make it work, and KEEP THE DAMN THING A SECRET UNTIL STEVE ANNOUNCES IT. That’s a big reason why his team is self-contained. It also means his people can do what needs to be done to implement things that never existed before and which don’t fit into normal IT “this is how we do things” standards. he and his teams spends most of his time off in uncharted territory where a need to be innovative and flexible is a must, and yet they have to do it on huge scales.
On the other hand, Eddy’s no easier to work with than Steve is, for obvious reasons. I invariably warned people not to hire into his groups unless they wanted to donate their life to the cause. When I was there, I worked pretty closely with various parts of his world, and it was populated with equal who were just as maniacal about this as Eddy and steve and people who were in process of burning out. Not much middle ground (but it works).
(full disclosure time: Laurie worked with Eddy way back when; me, I once almost got re-orged into his world until management remembered my vow to die before working for him, and re-arranged reality to fit (otherwise, lists.apple.com never would have existed….) — but I had a chance to deal with him while I was there and I’ve got a lot more respect for him now than I used to. I still wouldn’t want to work in the kind of grind his organization demands, though, but it does pretty good work under really scary conditions.
So you can bet, MobileMe will get fixed.
For the full article, (must read) click here.
