Apple, Inc. (AAPL) has some of the strongest brand reputation and customer loyalty in the world. The silicon valley tech giant has an extremely solid foundation of users and an enormous amount of general trust from their devoted customers. But since July 9th, Apple has had a rather large cloud hanging over its head.
This past June, at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference, CEO Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be releasing the iPhone 3G on Friday, July 9th. The launch was supposed to be another revolutionary day for Apple. In the months leading up to July 9th, Apple had spent exhaustive resources in securing deals with mobile carriers around the world. They were fast on track to do with the iPhone 3G, what they did with the original iPhone. Only this time, on a global scale, and with a more powerful, faster and surprisingly less expensive device.
One would think that Apple’s slow and steady rate of product releases has surely evolved into a methodical way of doing business. The company’s share prices have nearly doubled in the past 2 years, so they are obviously doing something right. So why did Steve Jobs and the rest of the gang schedule the ambitious release of the App Store, iPhone 2.0 Software and Mobile Me for the same day that iPhone 3G was being launched?
Four Long Weeks
In the past 4 weeks, Apple has been plagued with an overwhelming amount of negative press, almost putting the company in an amateurish light. Even the most devoted of customers began questioning Apple’s intentions and business practices. Countless bugs in the iPhone 2.0 Software, constantly crashing applications from the App Store, dead-end communication with developers, bad iPhone SDK NDA policies and the dreaded un-usability of Mobile Me, are only some of the things that Apple has had to deal with. The iPhone 3G has been getting horrible attention for its battery life, and the lack of certain features (copy-and-paste) are starting to drive people mad. Product review heavyweights like Walt Mossberg and David Pogue have not been able to recommend Apple’s products because of such issues.
With Steve At The Helm
On Monday, August 4th, Steve Jobs wrote an email to the entire Mobile Me team admitting the over-ambitious release of Apple’s products on July 9th. “The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour. There are several things we could have done better,” Jobs wrote in the leaked internal email. “Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts,” Jobs continued to explain. A methodical schedule of releases surely would have made more sense than rushing something as highly anticipated as Mobile Me, along side the iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 Software and the App Store. “It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence,” Jobs wrote to the team.
Steve Jobs is more than a great CEO. He is a genius, a devoted, passionate leader, and one of the greatest inventors of our time. However he and Apple are not perfect (no matter what the most devoted of fans says), they are not immune to mistakes. The most successful company in every industry or the best athlete in every sport, will make mistakes. It’s how they regroup and shift focus to recover from those mistakes that defines their ultimate success. When Steve Jobs reclaimed his CEO title at Apple in 1997, he proved that even in the toughest of times, if the company is at his helm, they can not only survive, but thrive. We should not be worried about how Apple is going to recover from the past 4 weeks, but more so what they have in store for us in the upcoming months.
The Next Four Weeks
An overhauled line of Mac notebooks with support for an extremely powerful new Operating System, overhauled Cinema Displays, (if rumors hold true) an unannounced “Special Event” in September and new iPod models are just some of things Apple potentially has planned.
A recent management shakeup has put Eddy Cue, the man in charge of iTunes, in charge of Mobile Me. He will now head all of Apple’s internet services, and will report directly to Steve Jobs. A former Apple employee, who worked on Apple’s email lists for many, many years recently spilled the beans about working under Eddy Cue. “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… So you can bet, MobileMe will get fixed,” the former employee explains.
What about the rest of it? Well, you can rest assured Apple is working around the clock on most of the issues that have been brought to light in the past few weeks. Certain aspects of the company will never change, such as their secrecy. So all we can do (for the most part) is intelligently speculate about the company’s next move.
They have already released an iPhone Firmware update, and they are generally claiming that (most of) Mobile Me is bug-free. The new products that are slated for release in the next few months will bring the company back into the positive light they deserve.
In the coming months, most of us will be awed by a new line of powerful notebooks, or cinema displays, and the past 4 weeks will remain in history. What we can learn from the past 4 weeks is that Apple’s slow and steady method of releasing products is that way for a reason. “We don’t get to do many things in our lifetime, so every one of them should be really great,” Steve Jobs proclaims.
Rest assured, Apple’s dark cloud will soon dissappear.
One Comment to “[Feature] Does Apple Have a Dark Cloud Over Its Head That Won’t Go Away?”
Maybe Google can share some its eternal sunshine?
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