I bet Steve Jobs completely lost it this week!
Wow! What a horrible week for Apple (at least Weds thru Friday). I have honestly never seen Apple blow it so bad on a week that could have been another brightest moment to add to the trophy case. Instead they hired Murphy to run the launch of MobileMe and the new iPhone/2.0 software launch.
For those who don’t know Murphy, he has a law named after him. ”Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way“ - Murphy’s Law.
Seriously, I would not have wanted to be the product Manager for MobileMe on Weds. Can you imagine the phone calls this guy/gal was getting from Jobs. Based on what I’ve heard and read, I would have to imagine someone was next to the mobileMe servers in the fetal position. The servers are up, and then their down. This cycle goes on for well over 24 hours. No was sleeping for the next 3 days for these guys.
Then comes the launch day of the phone. Friday you are hearing stories that no one can get their new 3G phones to activate. Now this one is probably AT&Ts fault. I can just imagine Steve on the phone ripping a new one at AT&T and telling them they suck and I wish we went with Verizon :).
Then to make it worse, the release of the iPhone 2.0 upgrade, cause people who did it early had their iPhones bricked because of the same activation problem that plagued the new iPhone subscribers.
Not only were the people who were getting new phones upset, but now you have your loyal users pissed because their phones don’t work! Thank goodness I was too busy writing my first iPhone app for a client that I did not have time to upgrade it that day. Later I did it and had no problems. (I think Murphy was finally fired when I got around to doing it.) I know that one of the guys at work had his phone bricked for about 3 hours before he was able to get it reconfigured again.
Finally you also begin to hear about problems of people with iPod Touch. I’m thinking this one was probably a bit overblown since everything else was going wrong so why not the iPod Touch.
However, in the end it seems everything worked out. I would have to say part of the problem why this launch was so bad compared to the perfect launch before was that you took your phone home and activated at your time. Not this old school crap of having to get it all done in the store like its 1999. You can bet that Apple is going to think twice about trying to keep AT&T happy if they can’t get their system working to do it smoothly as possible.
So there was probably a lot of screaming, lost voices, high blood pressure and a few people who either quit or got fired yesterday. Everyone is entitled to bad day, but this is rarely a day we see from Apple!
Comments
Comment from Niels Hansen
Time July 26, 2008 at 8:15 am
@Don Try it again. I believe there was a system bug that prevented certain accounts from working. I tried it this morning and its working again!
It’s good to see Apple is finally putting some ownership on the problem. You can check that out at
Comment from Don Hansen
Time July 24, 2008 at 8:11 am
Forget Jobs, I’m losing it! I was liking how Apple’s stuff justr worked. I click a button and wow it did a whole lot of stuff without me having to configure 80 settings and reboot 3 times and troubleshoot why it is not working.
Well not with the garbage MobileMe. Works so far on iPhone for contacts and what not, but I cannot upload iMovies or photos from iPhoto. Hit the MobileMe icon (use to be .Mac icon and wish it still was) and get message saying “MobileMe not configured. Do you want to configure?”.
Click yes and get into the system preferences, all is well I am logged in. Click MobileMe icon again and go through the same thing. Does it in iWeb and iMovie.
Now what sucks is I am sure it works for a lot of people. So now I feel like I am using Windows again, one of those issues where it works, except not in some cases no one can figure out. I am back to rebooting and troubleshooting and getting an infinite loop of clicking publish and being told something is not confugred, just to configure it and go through the cycel again.
So I hope Steve had a melt down and fired a lot of people. Maybe this will get the people left to get back to making it work like it use to. Stuff just worked!!