Apple posts a too late, corporate-speak update about MobileMe status
Posted on 26 July 2008, at 6:21 am, by Wayne Schulz
Apple yesterday posted an update on their highly publicized troubles with MobileMe which is an online replacement for their prior .Mac service. Using MobileMe users were supposed to get push email, calendar and contacts to either their Mac or iPhone. The service worked for most subscribers, but since iPhone launch day it has been unreachable or unstable for an estimated 1% (20,000) paying subscribers. The unsteadiness of a service that people rely on to run their business is very bad. What’s worse is that Apple failed to acknowledge or explain much of what was going on and when a fix might be expected. Too bad it took an unusually harsh public lashing by Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and David Pogue of the New York Times to perhaps motivate Apple to provide this public status check. This is one area where Apple would have benefited greatly by providing some public updates rather than waiting for the press to rip the service with poor reviews and tales of lost email. Now we are left with a watered down explanation from Apple – which I think can be summed up in these words “we weren’t ready, sorry”.
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July 26th, 2008 at 8:14 am
Ok I’m a total outsider on this issue, but my thoughts on all this & other similar issues out there in the wide world (as I understand it) are; most are able to be satisfied once a product is up & running successfully, but when there are problem issues the ‘whole world & his wife’ chastise these companies, including Microsoft.
The prime problem as I see it is that we the public at large expect products to be in perfect form from the initial outset, & here’s the but; we want a perfect product now or yesterday therefore ‘we’ the public push hard to get that & perhaps the producers are trying to satisfy public demand but are in reality not able to get the goods out there in perfect condition in the initial forms.
In conclusion I believe that, we the public/consumers are to blame at times for products being out there without real world testing, just because we want it immediately & not wait until it’s totally proven.
Just my penneth’s worth.
July 26th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Yes and no. Yes I agree with Nos1959 that we consumers push too hard sometimes and expect perfection. It’s almost impossible to predict what a release like this will get in traffic early on, so I would fully expect a spike and some service access problems until access settles out over a few days. On the other hand, no, I don’t think it is responsible for a company like Apple to put up software in a panic that has not been tested and just flat does not work to hit some artificial deadline that their CEO has set with no real clue as to how long it will really take the get the product ready for use.
I personally deal with that type of issue on a much too frequent basis and it has disaster written all over it every time. Too many yes men giving senior management unrealistic answers without talking to the operations and production team. I can almost tell you verbatim what was likely said in those meetings and I live 2,000 miles away.
Public companies release products like this due to one thing; driving quarterly earnings. They loathe to miss deadlines once they have been announced, and usually build much too little wiggle room into the timeline. And you are so correct that the public lashing that Apple took at the hands of Mossberg and Pogue is just not worth it – in fact its probably worse than missing the release deadline in the end. I’ve been a .Mac customer for 3 years and am canceling my account. Why on earth would I continue to spend hours thinking I have a problem on my end when its my provider and they don’t even have the common courtesy to give me a heads up for 14 days? Yikes!
Bill