Former Apple employee Chuq Von Rospach is offering insight as to what he thinks happened and will happen with Apple’s MobileMe, “Just imagine Steve Jobs wandering the hall with a flame thrower in hand, asking random people ‘do you work on MobileMe?'”
“I expect a bunch of friends and people I know were involved in that project, and I feel really bad for them,” Von Rospach writes. “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.”
“Someone [Steve Jobs] 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,” Von Rospach writes.
“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),” Von Rospach writes.
“And now Eddy [Cue] has been brought in to fix it, which means it’s going to get fixed,” Von Rospach writes. “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 [sic]. 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.”
“Apple has the expertise; this isn’t a case of MobileMe problems crawling out into itunes, but Apple bringing the iTunes expertise into MobileMe. And having thrown Eddy Cue at the problem, that’s exactly what’s going to happen here,” Von Rospach writes.
Much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
[Attribution: MacBlogz. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Before this MobileMe was Cueless.
snow 10.6 will have this beta for sale as an exchange killer
no doubt
On a visceral level, I really like the image of Steve nonchalantly strolling the halls with a flame thrower just before catapulting Eddy at a pile of MobileMe developers. (Eddy’s a big boy.)
If Cue’s groups worked on iTools/.Mac, were they not involved in transitioning to MobileMe? (didn’t read the full article)
I just don’t get the big deal about MobileMe being this huge disaster, it was “kinda” buggy for two maybe three days.
So Eddy Q. replaces David G.?
Does that make it G-Q?
(OK, I know one was just a spokesperson)
One of the better comebacks I have ever read on this board! Touchè!
Please fix iTunes. It has been really slow. Although, last night it was OK.
“Someone [Steve Jobs] 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,”
seems like a good career move at MS.
what was it that Billies wife worked on before he married her? MS Bob?
anyone know what Fester screwed up to get his position?
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@HMCIV:
How could Steve Jobs possibly stroll nonchalantly through the halls with a flame thrower?
You know, I just realized this ‘David G’ character hasn’t posted since July 29…
I suspect Steve took the MobileMe crew for an ‘elevator ride’ they’ll never forget!
Well, with a name like Chuc, he’s bound to get get MobileMe bac on trac.
That also makes me wonder, actually – does Steve have a Sad Mac branding iron? Perhaps failure in Apple is rewarded with the ultimate mark of shame, or perhaps it’s an ‘XP Certified’ sticker for really grievous offenses…
Silly me, SB baq on traq.
@Rick:
According to the aticle, Eddie Cue was working with iTunes (group) only…
“I just don’t get the big deal about MobileMe being this huge disaster, it was “kinda” buggy for two maybe three days.”
My calendars STILL do not sync correctly.
so basically we have another week or two about how mobileme went bad and steve jobs started beating people over the head with clue bats……. This is rather annoying.. Dont people realise this was Steve’s decision and yeah he should have waited but most the time rushing something out the door seems to work fine but this time didn’t happen quite so. The problems only lasted a few days anyways but good way for ” analysts ” to drive the stock down with negativity just to buy in low.
I don’t like the disaster term but it fits for people who lost their mail for a month. The whole iPhone/Mac/MobileMe has some interesting bugs and limitations. Putting aside the whole instant push stuff bugs, I have run into the following bugs and inconsistencies with Apple’s cloud effort in playing with it.
– iPhoto and the gallery are different that mail and calendaring. You don’t sync it between systems, its just pushed from one machine.
– On that note, since it looks like there is no sync between iPhoto, summaries entered into MobileMe don’t get sync’d to iPhoto. Trash a photo from a sync’d album in iPhoto, then change your mind because you made a mistake and that summary is gone.
– Gallery albums do not keep their ordering. It changes randomly.
– You can sync bookmarks between machines but you have no access from MobileMe.
– No email rules on the server. This makes push email to he iPhone worthless for me.
– Contacts on the iphone are missing the IM fields so AIM and others can not map IDs to full names.
– Can not select which calendars get sync to the iPhone through MobileMe. You can with iTunes.
– No sync’ing of subscribed or CalDAV calendars via MobileMe.
And that is just with a few days playing with the system. In other words, instead of the system working as you expect, you have to learn the quirks of the system. When you run into that quirk, its very annoying.
@Berrylium
I can just picture it.
Steve: Hey engineer. Do uh… do work on MobileMe?
Engineer: Yeah… GAAAH NOT THE FACE!!!
Steve: Hey software developer. Do uh… do work on MobileMe?
SW Dev: Umm… No?
Steve: Oh well what do you do?
SW Dev: I umm… umm… I’m working on a bluetooth interface for an iPhone keyboard? GAAAH IT HURTS IT HURTS!!!
I suspect that Steve Job’s “mercurial personality” is a calculated management technique, as evidenced by his measured, controlled reactions in interviews and when there are glitches at WWDC. An unstable person couldn’t pull off what he’s done.
That aside, MobileMe wouldn’t sync my AddressBook on one Mac and only one Mac. It also reported that every sync was successful, even though nothing changed. None of MobileMe’s solutions worked.
Then I had an idea. I upgraded from Tiger and had permissions problems in my account and had fixed them by hand. So I checked the permissions in the Library folder. The folder itself is supposed to have “Group:everyone deny delete” but none of the files and folders in it are supposed to have that. I ran Terminal and did this:
cd ~/Library
ls -le
Indeed! The files had “group:everyone deny delete”! That meant that MobileMe couldn’t do anything to the files it was supposed to sync. Apparently it does not have an error message for this situation. The fix is to run Terminal and do:
cd ~/Library
chmod -R -N *
All fixed, and MobileMe can sync.
By the way, this fix is harmless if you don’t need it.
This Chuque (Chuck?) guy would sound even more believable if he had spelt Johnny Ive’s last name correctly (it’s Ive; not Ives; there is Charles Ives, a famous 20th century composer — easy to confuse…).
Cue Eddy Cue!
Can he fix the comment system in iWeb so that it works again?
Kinda like it did BEFORE mobile me?
Pedrag,
I know Chuq, and he was indeed responsible for lists.apple.com while I worked at Apple.
-jcr
“I just don’t get the big deal about MobileMe being this huge disaster, it was “kinda” buggy for two maybe three days.”
“My calendars STILL do not sync correctly.”
Address Book syncing randomly a) deletes all contacts, b) adds dozens of empty cards, or c) duplicates hundreds of cards. Thank Jobs for Time Machine.