Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has admitted it was a "mistake" to roll out the company's MobileMe service at the same time it launched the iPhone 3G and other big products, tech news site Ars Technica reported on Monday.
Ars Technica cited an internal memo sent by Jobs to employees that acknowledged MobileMe had flaws and was released too soon. In the memo, Jobs said the launch of the service could have been handled better, the article said. He also acknowledged the service was "not up to Apple's standards", and said the individual MobileMe services could have been launched slowly instead of all at once.
"It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store," Jobs said in the email, according to Ars Technica. "We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence."
MobileMe is the next evolution of Apple's .Mac service. It is essentially a cloud storage solution that allows subscribers to synchronise email, calendars, contacts, photos, Safari bookmarks, Dashboard widgets and more, among Macs, the iPhone and the iPod Touch. It allows for 20GB of storage on Apple's servers, and even co-operates with Outlook on Windows computers. Because it is web based, subscribers can access the online applications from any web browser.
However, from its launch on 10 July, MobileMe has encountered problems. Most notably, subscribers had trouble accessing the site, and some even lost email.
In a blog started by Apple to keep subscribers up to date on the status of MobileMe, the company acknowledged that some people lost 10 percent of their email between 16 July and 18 July during the height of the outage.
That said, Apple asserts that only one percent of MobileMe users were affected by the email issues, which were apparently caused by a "serious problem with one of our mail servers", according to the Apple blog. MobileMe subscribers also had problems accessing calendars and contact information, which was caused by a misjudgment in demand, according to the Apple blog.
In this most recent memo to employees, Jobs urged them to learn from the mistakes and move on.
"The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about internet services," Jobs said in the memo. "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."
Talkback
PBS talks as though it was just the launch that was the problem. MobileMe is still broken and so I hope they are not going to "move on".
Really getting sick of doing Apples Beta testing for them and paying for the privellege.
If your company is enterting an industry that it has no experience surely you would get someone with relevant experience in as a consultant!? Both the iPhone and MobileMe feel like they were never tested outside of Apple offices before launch with bugs and issues you would only expect in beta. Some faults are there through technical issues or high demand but many are due to bad design which is inexcusible.
As long as Apple fanboys keep paying for unfinished and broken products and just accept that they have to wait for an update or the next hardware iteration then Apple have no real incentive to test their products prior to launch. They could re-release the Newton and as long as it had the Apple logo or Steve jobs face people would lap it up - madness.
after 25 days my sync worked sort of still does not really sync up properly with address book, but as you said David we are basically paying to work with BETA system, not cool at all.
What has frustrated me most about MobileMe, and perhaps I should have anticipated it, is not that the service is full of bugs even 100 days after it was launched (for some reason the calendars on my work Mac, home Mac and iPhone are all in different timezones so scheduling is fun. I am getting to like attending meetings at 3am) but the fact that when I choose to cancel the trial then, guess what?
MobileMe wipes all contact and calendar data from my iPhone...
This didn't put me in a good mood