MobileMe Pushes Back Everything
I haven't written anything about the ongoing MobileMe mess because when it started I just assumed that Apple would have everything fixed long before it became a huge, festering, embarrassing problem. Well, it has officially become a huge, festering, embarrassing problem. And the longer it continues, the bigger the problem gets.
This latest news of the reorg over at Apple can be looked at in one of two ways. The optimist in me sees this as a genuine attempt on Apple's part to remove incompetent management and replace it with a proven leader. Things will now improve and soon MobileMe will be back on track for an error-free relaunch.
The cynic in me sees things a little differently though. It is his opinion that this is a gesture made entirely for publicity reasons. Apple looked at the situation and realized that something had to be done to make it look like they were trying to fix the problem. Since you can be certain no one is ever going to come out and give the technical reason why they're having problems, the obvious solution is to blame management. "See, it isn't that we underestimated the amount of infastructure we needed, it's because a manager didn't do his job very well."
This second approach carries with it the implicit notion that this is a problem that can be fixed by putting the "right" person in charge. Thus, this is only a temporary setback, a slight miscalculation that soon will be put to rights. And maybe that is how this will all play out. I wouldn't bet on it, but you might be willing to believe it.
And now we come to the realization that it's August and this problem still hasn't been resolved. The holiday shopping season is just around the corner and there are rumors of new hardware coming. It could be very bad for Apple if this situation isn't fixed by then.
The first problem it raises is one of resources. The more time, money, and manpower that Apple devotes to fixing MobileMe, the less they will have for the rest of their products. Their second big problem is one of presentation. If Apple announces new products before MobileMe is fixed, then it doesn't look like a smooth sales pitch but rather comes across as a desperate attempt to draw focus away from their other problems. And that is hardly the kind of atmosphere you want if you are Steve Jobs walking up on stage to deliver something new and cool.
This all brings me back to my main point. The longer MobileMe is broken, the more everything gets pushed back. New hardware, new services, new anything. Nothing else can move forward until this problem is fixed. And it doesn't look like it is going to get fixed anytime soon.
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Yes, I admit that MobileMe’s introduction was not what I had come to expect from Apple. I waited until the iPhone fever died down before I activated my account.
What sort of problems are people still having with MobileMe today?
I still can’t add the prorated Family Plan to my account. When I bought iPhone 3G for me wife and I, we purchased the Family plan (which was activated in the Apple store by an Apple employee. After that, they tried to apply the proration to add my wife. No dice. Still doesn’t work 3 weeks later. Just gets stuck on the last web page where you enter the credit card.
I’ve called to complain at Apple CS and even filed a bug on the bug reporter. All I get is “yeah, it doesn’t work for me either!"… Yeesh!!
Piko
Problems?
I would never pay $100 for .mac, and I’m now sure that I will never pay $100 for MobileMe. It’d be frustrating enough if a free service like Gmail lost my e-mails. It’s unforgivable if a paid service does it.
I can see that a lot of people who bought mobile me aren’t the same type of people who will tolerate Apple treating them like scum and gladly paying for it like the .mac folk were. I was one of them. I started using my .mac email for business and didn’t want to change it, so I kept paying and paying. I started to hunt around for deals and was able to get the fee down to about 70 bucks, but it still was a ripoff. I hope that the media and all these new iPhone users who were suckered into buying .me rip Apple a new corn chute.
I liked Apple better when it was a small fish in a big pond, now it’s a bloated fish in a big pond.
I only had a permissions problem on one computer that had nothing to do with MobileMe but had the side-effect of disabling sync. It turned out to be my fault and it was easy to fix.
The downtime wasn’t a problem for me, because I had anticipated that there would be a surge the first few days after the transition.
Ummm… MobileMe worked fine for me from the start. Then, last week I found that about 40% of the content on my iDisk was missing. Fortunately, I had a recent copy not in the cloud and was able to update the iDisk content to get everything back online. Since then, it’s properly synced with all my Macs and everything is once again back to normal and working fine for me.
So, yes, there have been some bumps, but I think it’s a bit of an overstatement to say the catastrophe continues. I’m now wary enough to expect an occasional hiccup from here on out, but truly believe the worst is behind us.
We’ll see.