Below you’ll find the entire “MobileMe launch wasn’t very good” e-mail Steve Jobs sent to employees. He sent it on Monday, claims Ars.
Team,
The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour. There are several things we could have done better:
– 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.
We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love. One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services – iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe. Eddy’s new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me.
The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. 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.
Steve
Now let’s all leave Steve alone.
LOL, wonder if a blogger/news site has ever say let’s leave Bill Gates, Michael Dell or Jeff Bezos alone.
MobileMe shows that Apple has growing pains that are experienced by larger corporations, it’s easy when your small to have very good products and software, but Apple isn’t in the shallow end anymore, unless you consider that the iphone sells of over 1 millions units is done daily by Nokia. That kind of puts it in perspective.
Rambling…
Apple fanboi or not, it’s good to see that (if this email is true) Jobs is learning from the failure and restructuring/retooling as necessary so that kind of thing doesn’t happen in the future. Randy’s earlier comment is spot on; Apple’s growing and becoming more and more mainstream. They have a reputation for an OS that “just works” and a slick design for all of their hardware. So, they need to continue to ratchet it up as the look at expanding their software and internet-based solutions to the mass market.