Steve's Letter on the MobileMe Problem

MobileMe is a service that Apple launched with the iPhone 3G release.  It was a replacement for the old .Mac service.  The basic idea was the ability to bring push email to the iPhone and make it possible to sync your calendar, mail, contact, and other information across multiple computer and devices.  For example, if you made a calendar event of your iPhone, the same change would take place on your desktop computer's calendar.  The idea was simple enough but the implementation wasn't.  MobileMe was a disaster when it was released.  The servers were overwhelmed, it ran sluggish or not at all at times.  Apple is going to be quick to fix this though and has already restructured and taken steps to get MobileMe back on track.  Steve Jobs has already issued his own words on the subject.  Here is the internal letter that Steve Jobs wrote

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

Once's Apple gets their MobileMe service back and running and working up to Apple standards it should make the iPhone and Mac Computers much more appealing.

via: Boy Genius Report