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.
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