“Intended to supplant the company’s aging .Mac Web service, MobileMe is meant to make Apple a player in the online portal world now dominated by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. So far it has served only to tarnish Apple’s reputation for producing solid, pain-free, software,” John Markoff blogs for The New York Times.
“Fumbling MobileMe has revealed a previously hidden side of Apple that suggests that a decade of increasingly strong products has left the quirky computer maker with a bit too much hubris. Apple obviously bit off more than the company could chew two weeks ago when it shipped a second-generation iPhone, updated six million existed iPhone customers to a new software version and rebranded its .Mac service all within the space of a 24-hour period,” Markoff reports.
“It was particularly unusual for a Steve Jobs marketing event. In recent years there has increasingly been One Big Thing insuring that consumers aren’t distracted from the message of the moment,” Markoff reports.
“Obviously a better strategy would have been to stage the software and hardware and to have launched MobileMe as ‘beta,’ giving the company air cover to patch the more than 70 bugs it has acknowledged in just two weeks of being hammered on by frustrated Macintosh devotees,” Markoff reports.
“One thing that has been interesting to watch has been Silicon Valley’s reaction to the MobileMe meltdown. There has been no shortage of schadenfreude. At Google, for example, two executives separately noted with some glee that Apple might have considered outsourcing the service to the search-engine provider,” Markoff reports.
Full article here.
Also blogging for The New York Times, David Pogue writes, “It would have been a lot better if MobileMe had worked great from Day One. It would have been better if Apple had been this candid from the beginning.”
Pogue writes, “But at least Apple has finally provided what thousands of people have been aching for: honesty, transparency, and, above all, a sympathetic ear.”
Full article here.
@rahens
“Especially since they gave you a free month!”
Right on.
However, you have to have a MobileMe account to get the free month. Most of the complainers here aren’t qualified as such.
Uh, yeah, you had to have an account – either .Mac converted to MM or that MM account. Mine was a .Mac converted to MM. (BOTH got that free month!!)
Still works, and did from the gitgo.
If you don’t have an account, you have no right to complain.
I think it was fine. It is much better to launch something, have some bugs, and get them squashed right away than to let something be BETA for a long period of time.
It would have made more sense to have .Mac -> .Me happen a week or two before the iPhone 3G launch…….oh well. Retrospect is 20/20
I have one friend with troubles… everyone else is running along just fine. Another case of the media blowing things WAY out of proportion. Apple is working hard on the fix, and I am sure in a month all this will be a blip in history… and MobileMe will start gaining ground as end user confidence builds. It is quite powerful stuff in the hands of mere mortals IMO.
Not trying to start trouble, just a bit of a word curmudgeon…
@rahrens – I think you meant to say that it worked for you from the get-go. @ericdano – Did you perhaps mean to say “Hindsight is 20/20”?
I have had a bit of trouble but absolutely nothing catastrophic, and I use time machine so everything would have been recoverable if anything had been lost.
I also think that it was a huge mistake for Apple to launch iPhone 3G, MobileMe, and AppStore all on the same day. I think that they should have launched them over the course of a week or so, and they should have done some kind of rolling switch from .mac to me.com rather than moving several million people over 24 hours. Hopefully, things will continue to work properly and the remaining bugs will be squashed in short order.
While some have had tons of trouble with MobileMe, the vast majority have used the service without a hiccup. I have never lost access to my email during the many hours I spend on my computers. I have had no problems with synching to either of my first and second generation iPhones. Other than one afternoon in the week before roll-out, I have been able to access my iDisk. My web pages have been fine–and on and on and on. In our family, there are 9 other Mac/Mobile Me users. They too have had no issues. Sounds like we are a part of the 99% who have every reason to love and trust MobileMe!
You know everyone is knocking mobile me. I have been a .mac customer since I switched over from a pc 3+ years ago. Grant it mobileme has some major issues. Those issues from what I have read are configuration issues on servers and network appliances. Its not like they released a crappy operating system onto the world that are causing people to update to newer machines and is dog slow. OH wait that’s microsoft. Remember that apple always improves after a first release…
Rather than making it beta, they should have just staggered the cut-over of existing .Mac users. Migrate a few percent a day, provide easy channels for feedback, and adjust up or down depending on how it goes. Give the people who have to wait for the migration a free extension of their service based on how long they waited.
The that surprises me most is that Apple and Steve don’t seem to have learnt anything from the iPhone 1 introduction. They just scaled everything up and got burnt even more.
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Apple has pretty much falling upon a common crack in the internet world. The problem with web-apps is no matter how many times you test it, on however many browsers stuff still goes wrong. As a web app developer I come across these problems all the time. There is the odd user with identical stats to the next that just won’t get the same functionality for some unknown reason. Only it’s usually, 1 out of 100 if any, not quite on the scale of Apple’s glitch.
Apple hitch was trying to swap .mac to mobileme in one stint instead of releasing mobileme then a month or two later removing .mac so if anything went wrong in mobileme, users can still use the old .mac temporarily. I assume there was reason for a direct swap, but it’s not a good situation to put yourself in or your customers.
The damage has been done, lucky I didn’t sign up for MobileMed straight away! I think I’ll give it another month before I jump on the mobile me wagon.