This past summer Apple revamped its online suite of applications changing its name from dot-mac to Mobile Me. The transition was painstaking and users that were most affected suffered months of email being lost or deleted. One question we’ve been wondering ourselves is, was it worth it?
Nearly 5 months have gone by since Apple launched Mobile Me. In the first months of Mobile Me being live, the service was plagued with downtime, lost messages, syncing issues and an overall stability meltdown. So much so that Apple launched a Mobile Me status blog and assigned a blogger named “David G.” to directly communicate with its customers.
Apple went through a series of public apologies, and ultimately offered Mobile Me customers a few months of free service. A few weeks after Mobile Me officially launched, an internal email from CEO Steve Jobs was leaked to Ars Technica. After some ethical debates over at Ars they posted the entire email verbatim. This came roughly two weeks after Walt Mossberg laid the hammer down calling Mobile Me “far too flawed to recommend.” By this point, most users who had attempted to make it through the Mobile Me transition were left stunned, frustrated and worse of all, had lost vital messages due to technical failures on Apple’s end.
A couple of comments from some MacBlogz readers during the transition:
“Seriously, a company with a market capitalization of about $150 BILLION dollars, with more than $10 BILLION available in cash/short term assets, should be able to provide a service to what, a few hundred thousand users, that doesn’t go down every couple of weeks.”
“It was Tuesday, July 29th when my email stopped working completely. Now it’s late Wednesday and it’s still not working. Signing on to the support site for an update and having them tell me everything is great is more than annoying. And now it’s too late for any chat support and they appear to have eliminated any kind of email support. If you are having a problem they don’t want to hear from you.”
“Well, I lost nearly 3 days worth of emails. Who can I complain to? How can they put a value on these emails?”
Looking back on the Mobile Me launch, it’s easy to say that Apple was over-ambitious. They launched the iPhone 3G, the App Store and Mobile Me on the same day. For a company that doesn’t launch many products or services throughout the year, was there really a reason to unveil all three things on the same day? After all, the Mobile Me issues were only a portion of the overall disaster. iTunes servers went down, people were sent home with bricked iPhones, and the new iPhone Firmware 2.0 was shaky to say the least. Not Apple’s brightest moment.
The problems with Mobile Me however, stem much deeper than what lies on the surface. Apple employees were fired over the meltdown, and iTunes service guru Eddy Cue was brought in to head Mobile Me’s team while reporting directly to Steve Jobs. It was evident that Apple was not happy with Mobile Me’s launch. After putting so much time into revamping dot-mac, when they finally thought they “got it right,” the new service didn’t work.
Apple should make it a point and take a serious lesson from its mistakes here. Internet services are not the same as downloaded desktop clients like iTunes. They require a much more scalable infrastructure, and when slammed to capacity, a backup plan (or five), should be in place. Considering Apple’s close relationship with Google, they should have reached out to the internet giant for some help.
The eternal battle between Apple’s priorities with form over function played a major role in this summer’s past Mobile Me meltdown. Apple puts so much emphasis on making sure every millimeter of the screen is pixel perfect, and that the User Interface is so shiny that you want to lick it. But when it comes to the core infrastructure of the service, or the back-end functionality holding up in critical times, it seemed like an after thought. Perhaps in the future they’ll spend less time on perfecting that gradient, and more time making sure their servers scale.
17 Comments to “Reflection: Was This Summer’s Mobile Me Meltdown Worth It?”
I’ve seen this happening more and more since Apple released Tiger. There are only so many things that a person can handle before it’s made apparent that Apple’s priorities are kind of screwed up. The UI needs to be perfect.. I agree. But not at the expense of the functionality. EVER.
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Take a look at Vista and then it will seem as if your in heaven with OS X
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“Perhaps in the future they’ll spend less time on perfecting that gradient, and more time making sure their servers scale.” <—- ZING !!!
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Was This Summer’s Mobile Me Meltdown Worth It? NOOOOOOOOOOO!!! It was NOT ! dot-mac was fine. Mobile Me entirely was a fucking mess.
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No. It wasn’t worth the five months of troubles. I’m sorry Apple. It just wasn’t.
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Tough question to answer… though certainly a staggered release would have probably worked out better.
For me, the back-end services are now working fairly well; meaning my email seems to be pushed reliably, and my MobileMe calendars are syncing ok.
But the actual web interface for MobileMe mail is still an embarrassment IMHO. Yes, it looks nice, but I cannot get over how slow it is, and how many random connection/error messages I *still* receive to this day.
Compare the speed of reading and replying to messages in Gmail vs. MobileMe webmail, and you realize there is absolutely no comparison.
I had hoped that the appointment of Eddy Cue to head the MobileMe team (after its disastrous introduction) would speed-up the speed-ups, but it hasn’t happened yet from what I can tell. I am forever sick of the “Loading…” animation!
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I’m not trying to get too personal here… But, it seems like Apple had a chart they were throwing darts at. One one side was a pool of gradients and shiny graphics, on the other side, stability enhancements… Can we guess which side more darts landed on?
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Mobile Me is a joke. The UI takes like 10 seconds to load between each click. Definitely not built with productivity in mind.
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Yes, it has been worth it. I didn’t have a problem at all when they switched from .Mac to .Me and the ability to have multiple computers synced, my contacts synced across multiple computers and an iPhone, and calendars. Totally worth it.
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same thing for me. no issues at all. well not totally true. a couple of times my email was a tad delayed. maybe like an hour and perhaps 3 times in the last five months I couldn’t republish my fairly large iweb created site to the server in the middle of the day (so I waited until bed time and did it over night with no issues. not a biggie and perhaps something that would have happened under the old system as well. it’s a huge site and I was doing a publish all)
and not all the blame on the iphone mess is Apple’s. ATT still hasn’t got their system together
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I think the problems will be less without the forced release dates of macworld in the future.
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I’m sorry but mobile me has been a huge let down. I paid 99$ for a year. in that year theyve barely gotten it working correctly. its features are sparse. Free google mail and calendar offer a larger, better feature set. its ridiculous.
I cant set up filters, rules, no task list.
what exactly did i pay for.
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I canceled my subscription after 2 months of usage. File sharing was not usable, because it was too slow, other syncs were just too lame and too shiny, but not made to encrease user’s productivity. And the price is problem number 2. You just can’t sell this. Learn from google!
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If you are going to begin an article with a question, you should answer it. I’m wondering if the state of mobile me is better now. How much better? Should I consider it? I read your article and you have offered me nothing.
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Hey Rue
Thanx for the feedback. I would still consider Mobile Me an untagged beta. If you are looking for a life suite of applications online that can carry over into your mobile life, then you should definitely consider it. As far as the state being better… Apple continues to release updates to the web apps, and I’m sure stability will increase in the future. Still though, $99 may be a bit much for most. If you haven’t given Mobile Me a spin, Apple offers up a free trial.
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eh I agree people had problems…. but it as flawless for me
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I signed up for Mobile Me the first day it was released- haven’t had the slightest problem with it since. I love the service, and though I wish it was cheaper, or even free, I’m very glad to have it. I’m unsure where a lot of this animosity stems from, though I can say for sure it has very little to do with the service itself.
If you don’t find value in it, don’t use it. It is that simple. Apple gave everyone ample time to try it for free during its introduction. I only just this past week had to pay for it.
There are plenty of free alternatives – no one *needs* Mobile Me. But, I for one find it an elegant extension of my Mac experience and will continue to pay for it as long as it is available.
This is a bit like complaining over and over about what’s on TV. If you don’t like it, turn it off. No one forced you in to anything. You all haven’t been raped – settle down a bit.
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