Apple issues MobileMe status update
- July 26th, 2008
- 2 Comments
Updated sometime yesterday, Apple has given it’s status report regarding the epic failure of MobileMe. Here’s what they had to say.
Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe, and I’m working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date. In the 14 days since we launched, it’s been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering. Be assured people here are working 24-7 to improve matters, and we’re going to favor getting you new info hot off the presses even if we have to post corrections or further updates later.
One issue we encountered was a mail outage affecting 1% of our members. Last Friday a serious problem with one of our mail servers blocked those members’ access to their MobileMe mail accounts. As of today a team was able to restore limited web access to those accounts so the affected members can use their browsers to read mail that has arrived since last Friday (though not before) as well as send and receive new mail. The team has already begun rolling out restoration of full access for all the accounts and expect to finish by the end of next week. We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10% of the messages received between July 16 and July 18.The day we launched MobileMe, we had a lot more traffic to our servers than we anticipated, with the result that access to the web versions of the MobileMe applications — Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, iDisk — was temporarily unavailable. We’ve since added server capacity and tuned our software to scale better — i.e. behave more gracefully when traffic spikes. The team has also fixed over 70 bugs including one that was preventing MobileMe IMAP mail folders from syncing correctly between the web app and Mac OS X Mail or Outlook, plus others correcting display issues in Calendar and in general enhancing the performance of our web apps.
We’ll post another update later this weekend to report on status and hopefully further progress.
yoshi (Who am I?)
2 months ago
I hardly call it an epic failure. Last year iPhone activations took 36 hours or longer for many customers and yet everyone mysteriously forgot about that during the delayed activations this year (which took much much less time). Will anyone remember the delay next year? Hardly - not even hack journalists remember last years iPhone glitches.
If these mobileme’s problems persist for months - then you can move into “epic failure” mode - but please spare use the false outrage until then.
Kyle (Who am I?)
2 months ago
The “epic failure” part wasn’t just the botched launch, but the entire execution… Specifically, (1) naming it “MobileMe” and (2) not offering a free basic version.
Maybe I’m weird, but every time I see “@me.com”, two words come to mind: “self-centered” & “commercialized”
Why would I pay for an email address that makes me cringe?
Apple should go the route of Google Apps - quickly - and offer their suite of apps for *any* domain.
Which brings be to my second issue: it doesn’t matter how shiny or cool your webapp is, you’ll lose 75% of your potential users at the front door if you require a credit card at signup.
If Apple were really savvy, they’d let people try MobileMe for the 60-day trial w/o requiring a credit card. During the trial an “X days left” message would pop-up after login, and after the 60-days people would be locked out.
And rather than only allowing $99 pre-payment for a year, they should have a monthly option for $10/mo.
If they fix those things, sign me up!