What Apple Should Have Done with MobileMe
Sunday, August 03 2008
In case you haven’t heard – Apple’s MobileMe service has experienced nothing but massive issues since the day it went (er supposedly went…) live. MobileMe is the replacement to Apple’s .Mac service and is a all-in-one place for email, calendar, photos, online storage etc. MobileMe has been plagued with downtime, shoddy email service, and significant reliability issues. Walt Mossberg says Apple’s MobileMe is far too flawed to even be reliable. Robert Scoble has posted today about a new problem after finding his events wiped from his Outlook calendar thanks to MobileMe. Matter a fact, Scoble is warning users to stay away from MobileMe:
“Do not buy Mobile Me. Do not install it. Be warned.”
I’ve read Scoble for a long time (as many others have of course) but when he posts a warning such as this about a product – that’s really bad.
The rest of the blogosphere has nicknamed MobileMe “FailMe”.
Of course people who read me are going to assume because I’m “Pro-Microsoft” I’m going to use this and go off on some sort of rant about how Apple sucks etc.
Nope.
Instead, I am going to write about what I think Apple should have done since Day 1 for MobileMe to avoid this whole mess.
It’s simple: Apple should have launched MobileMe as a BETA service first. Instead, Apple arrogantly chose to launch the service (I use the word “launch” loosely) full-on at the same time completely closing down their already existing .Mac service. Apple thought everything would turn out super-awesome. Of course the .Mac customers were automatically thrown into MobileMe. Now having .Mac users ported into MobileMe would have been fine if MobileMe actually worked but it didn’t. Apple should have kept the .Mac service alive and kicking while they beta tested MobileMe separately so they can make fixes and tweaks to the service so when they do officially “launch” MobileMe, it wouldn’t be such a disaster. I find it hard to believe Apple, being as secret as they are, gets enough feedback simply by internal testing alone. I mean you would assume significant internal testing of MobileMe occurred and look what happened? Apple simply didn’t have enough testing done on MobileMe. That’s why I believe the problems happening now are happening. Testing a web service release is very important.
Anyway, I wish Apple best of luck with MobileMe. It sucks to see them struggling with it. I have several friends who are really upset right now at Apple because of MobileMe and I don’t blame them. However there are quite a few free services from lots of other people that offer quite a bit of what MobileMe offers so I list off several alternatives for my friends to explore. I imagine some folks will be asking for their money back if they’ve actually chosen to pay for the service rather than the 30 day trial.
Tags: apple, mobileme, mac, web-services, calendar, beta, opinion
5 comment(s) so far
Steve Jobs said it appropriately, Mobile Me should have been a phased roll out, with certain parts available at first, most likely least critical areas of the service. My understanding is people use the Calendar and Email features the most, those should have been last, at least until the iPhone 3G launch had simmered down. Microsoft realized this with the Windows Live introduction, in fact, users had a choice between classic or the new Windows Live service, whether you wanted the old or new hotmail for instance, it was up to the user, which made me personally feel like I was in control.
Good idea. Windows Live services are down all the time, and no one cares.
You are right Tim, but at least Windows Live services are not as disruptive (people like lost email because of the transition). Its one thing for a service to be down, but another for it to cause damage. Another recent case is Gmail and Google Apps service which was down for about 15 hours. I have never experienced anything like that with Hotmail and I have been using it for ages.
In going to Control Panel on my PC this a.m., I find a microme icon which was not there yesterday. clicking it brings up a pitch to try it. What is it doing in my Control Panel and why can't I delete it?
HS
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I agree that Apple should have taken more time, and had a beta period. Even a staggered roll-out might have been better.
Although I did have a few issues at the start, MobileMe has been flawless lately and it's really a fantastic service.