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.]
