MobileMe Meltdown Redux!
Almost every employee at Small Dog Electronics has a MobileMe account, carried over from having a .Mac account. That’s because Apple grants a free .Mac/MobileMe account to everyone who becomes an Apple Product Professional, and Apple Product Professional certification is a job requirement at Small Dog Electronics. These free MobileMe accounts have limited features, notably limited online storage. That’s why I decided to continue to pay to renew my .Mac (and now MobileMe) account [Note – Just found out this is incorrect! I wasted all that money… oh well, thanks to those who alerted me to this fact!]
I’ve had a .Mac email address since iTools in 2000.
While some people have had problems with MobileMe, neither I nor anyone else at Small Dog has had trouble with the service after the clumsy initial launch.
The worst issue with MobileMe was probably when 1% of users couldn’t access their email accounts at all. That would have made me furious; I depend heavily on email to deliver crucial family, financial, work and Red Sox information. I was thinking about what I would do without email; write real letters again? I don’t know. Fortunately, affected MobileMe accounts have since been reactivated and repaired. The Me.com website is also running as it should, with faster load times across all pages.
Apple has taken MobileMe’s serious issues, well, very seriously. Sure, MobileMe subscribers get an extra 30 days of “free” service at the end of their subscriptions to make up for the clumsy launch. More to the point, however, MobileMe is going to get a special focus from Apple so these issues never happen again.
A “leaked” internal email from Steve Jobs last week outlines some of the issues and offers hope for the future. Quotes from the email:
“MobileMe was simply not up to Apple’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.”
“Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts.”
“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”
“And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.”
The entire email is worth reading – click here to go to Ars Technica for more.
Some commentators are saying that Apple can’t manage large scale Internet services. However, this is incorrect. On Daringfireball.net, for example, Jon Gruber reminds us that the iTunes Store is a massive-scale Internet service that Apple has managed remarkably well.
Regarding the email outages, Me.com is unfortunately one of many email providers to experience temporary blackouts. Even Gmail, which I rely on in tandem with MobileMe, has had major issues – including users getting permanently locked out of all their Google Services (including Gmail). At least MobileMe has tech support (as it should, being a paid service), including a 24 hour chat line (link below). It’s important to keep email backups, or even to activate some form of email forwarding to a backup email account.
I can honestly say that I’ve experienced no problems with MobileMe beyond the initial launch. A major sync problem I had a couple of weeks ago was not caused by MobileMe (and a reset and sync from MobileMe resolved the issue).
Here’s looking to the future with MobileMe – with renewed focus, excellent oversight, and a more disciplined approach to rolling out new services.
Further Reading:
Apple keeps a MobileMe blog here.
Users with MobileMe email issues can get support via chat here.