Apple now posting near-daily MobileMe outage updates - Page 2

After all these years, I find it amazing that computer hardware and software companies can release products with myriad flaws and, in the end, there is no serious blow back. Imagine if Nissan released a new car and vital parts of it simply didn't work? Sure, every now and then a recall occurs, but I've never heard of a recall because a car had 70 problems! (and let's face it, that's probably a low estimate!)

Heck, not only did Apple create a creepy Mobile Me logo that looks waaaaay to MS in style, but, apparently, they borrowed some of the Vista engineering knowhow as well!

OE

Yahoo = free
Gmail = free
Windows Live = free
AOL = free
MobileMe = not free
Blackberry = not free

I can live with free services acting up, but if it's something that's being paid for, more than a day or two of severe issues is inexcusable.

And lots of businesses rely on Blackberries; if Apple could get their ducks in a row, they could put a hurt on RIM. Or maybe not, it's the nature of the enterprise, and Apple has learned a valuable lesson.

Yeah, everyone has problems, but ever since Apple has had to move engineers over to the iPhone, they've playing catch-up ever since.

Leopard launch = buggy,
iPhone/Touch FW 2.0 = buggy,
MobileMe launch = buggy.

When you're charging people $99 for e-mail plus, you don't lose e-mail. You don't. Sure, people should back important e-mails, but that sort of defeats "cloud" computing, and IMAP. Apple should back up their stuff too. At least they've giving people an extra month of service.

If MobileMe was free, no one would really care, "oh, it's free! jeeze...".

Beta testing? While MobileMe is a new name, it's also a revamped .Mac, which has been around for ages. Do you really expect them to slap a BETA sign on it? This is a consumer-oriented service, the average consumer has no idea what beta means in terms of software. All good software is a work in progress.

Also, I've been a gmail user for years and while I like it quite a lot, it's free for a reason: ads. Pretty much everything Apple puts out is completely anti-advertising, which I REALLY appreciate. MobileMe is an example of Apple selling software as a service. Gmail is quite competent for a free email client, but once MobileMe gets its edges smoothed out - its problems are partially caused by the web traffic Apple's servers faced and are still facing from the unprecedented demand for the iPhone 3G - it's going to surpass all the online email competitors I've seen with ease of use thanks to it's implementation of things like SproutCore, which offers a near-desktop like experience within a web browser. Then you factor in it's push contacts, calendar, and email syncing, seamless iWeb publishing, picture/video gallery, and its use of iDisk that basically eliminates the sending of attachments over the internet altogether in a cohesive, easy way.

Get over this "free" bit. Free has nothing to do with it. If a product is defective, and you rely in it, its the same thing. Google and others only give these so called "free" products to get you in their system, so you can see their ads, from which they make their money. I really don't see the difference. $99 a year ($79 at Amazon) is chump change.

And, yes, they would care, even if it were free

jeeze...

The is merely Steve Jobs and Apple wanting us to have a more Microsoft-like experience.

Who in the hell at Apple thought it was a good idea to launch 4 MAJOR, GIGANTIC, MISSION CRITICAL PRODUCTS ON THE EXACT SAME DAY?!?!

1. MobileMe
2. iPhone 3G
3. iPhone 2.0 software
4. Apps Store

Um, HELLOO?!?! Is anybody THINKING at Apple these days?

Considering the iPhone, which has only been out a year, has already displaced all of Microsoft's Windows Mobile phones and all of Symbian's phones, with the remaining competitor being RIM's established BlackBerry, Apple's obviously doing something right. On the subject of BlackBerrys, you do realize the iPhone now surpasses RIM's so called "enterprise-hardened" phone with Apple's licensing of ActiveSync, right? That allows the iPhone to directly access Exchange servers, rather than going through a third party up in Canada, like BlackBerrys do, which has caused a number of outages in the past few months.

Now factor in that the iPhone is still largely being marketed and tailored for the average consumer, while RIM's phones are mainly billed as business phones. It's comical how easily all these smart phone makers have been blind-sided by a 1 year old phone when they've had a multi-year head start.

The iphone 1.0 will always be the worst iphone ever made. Admit it! For those of us who were brave enough to take the plunge on that sweet brushed aluminum piece of art, you know we were just a small group of beta testers in a controlled study. The 3G/2.0 is a potential world-changer and pretty ballsy if you think about it. Marginal, methodical tweaks and improvements are all Apple has to worry about now. I know that necessity drives invention, so it's good to be unsatisfied until perfection is achieved, but seriously....this thing rocks!!!!!!!

Don't push it. No one uses live, and Microsoft is even worse mass level fcuk ups. Vista launch and the daylight saving patch of death are just 2 recently.

Everyone should relax 4G/3.0 will be great!

Apple still has to get their service fully operational first, then they can look ahead to RIM and MS. And as far as MS, I only though they cared about the PDA/smartphone market because of Palm, and Palm has long stopped innovating ever since Sony dropped their Clie line.

For myself, I don't have a need for push services yet, and there's just a limit to how "connected" I want to be, and I've never seen the appeal of reading/writing e-mail on small screen (my Nokia does support BB/Exchange services too). Nokia is pretty good, (outside of Att not supporting my phone like 15 minutes after I bought it), and I've never had a problem with Symbian apps (or WinMob on my old Dell X5).

All I really need is calendar syncing support, and that's easy to do between iCal and Outlook via Bluetooth.

I have heard a rumor through engadget, of Symbian and Android merging, and then going open source. Don't think I buy it though.

Wha? Sorry, I think I phrased things poorly. Apple has already outpaced all smart phones, with RIM's established BlackBerry being the exception. They're passed WinMobile, Symbian, etc.


I wasn't talking about what the average consumer wants, but about the enterprise sector. Did you read my post? Not trying to condescend or anything, but nothing you've said is really in response to my comments.

I completely agree. They should have limited MobileMe service to existing .Mac subscribers until they had worked out the kinks in the transition. Maybe even slowly transitioned the existing .Mac base over a 2-week period to limit any problems that crop up. But trying to launch the whole new service with newly developed web applications, and full PUSH technology, while also transitioning over the existing base of .Mac subscribers and accepting new membership ALL AT ONCE? It's really not hard to imagine why the results turned out the way they did.

An a related note. data loss is never acceptable, but we are not talking about a long established service losing data because it didn't have proper backups, we are talking about the launch of a new, very complex service and a transition of old data to the new platform. And email "data loss" is obviously much less critical than really any other sort since all the data should be able to be resent, although the week delay is a killer for time-sensitive issues.

I understand that MobileMe is not a free service, and that everyone is a paying customer, but people *NEW* to the MobileMe/".Mac" service don't have a lot of room to bitch if they were relying on this service for critical business. You'd have to be CRAZY to rely on a freshly launched, highly complex, untested consumer service for important business email! That would be akin to haphazardly upgrading your only critical production web server to an unreleased alpha version of a future service pack found on a torrent site!

Although, even though I'd highly advise against running critical business email on a consumer email service like .Mac (or GMail for that matter), The *EXISTING* customers of .Mac email that were forced onto this new platform and lost their email access as a result do have a completely legitimate reason to be pissed off and demand some form of compensation - especially since it is a pre-existing for-profit service.

Symbian still beats Apple worldwide, with around 60% of the market.

If it's the US only, Nokia/SE has hardly any presence, as most carriers only sell the crappiest of flip-phones; in Europe and Asia, their basic are awesome compared to the ones here, and Nokia usually sticks to sending their junk here. A couple million iPhones does look impressive, but worldwide, it's a drop in the bucket compared to Symbian, as Nokia has sold over 100 million.

With Apple making both "smartphones" and subsequently candybar phones more popular Nokia should see an upswing in the US in both those areas.

Backup plan? How about not abandoning the old service so quickly!

Is it really that hard to keep multiple email accounts?


What you say has not been my general experience with Gmail at all, and I haven't heard of problems of Gmail losing mail, or really problems near the scale that you seem to suggest.


I doubt the money from tiny ads on Gmail really compare to what Apple makes with MobileMe. As far as I know, the money comes from clicks, not the impressions.

I've never been a fan of the way the Gmail web portal is setup( and thanks to free POP and IMAP I don't have to use it), but I, too, have never had any issues with Gmail.

No business worth their salt would move all their email and calendars to a brand new system that hasnt been fully vetted yet, apple, microsoft or otherwise. It's just...poor business instinct. one day mobileme may be a good choice for businesses, but its foolish to risk money on it.

Has the cost of MobileMe been analyzed in-depth? From time-to-time I've read complaints about .Mac/MobileMe being too costly or that it shoudl be free since other email services are free. I usually don't pay much attention to those posts as they aren't considering the other services offered with Apple's email. By itself, cloud data storage for 10GB generally cost more than $99/year Apple charged for .Mac but it's been some time since I've checked the prices. I do know that Amazon's service looks inexpensive as 20GB of storage is only $3/month (15¢ per GB) in the US, but they also charge 10¢ per GB uploaded and downloaded.

Then there is the push and the automatic backup of your User Account settings, including your Keychaiin, and personal web hosting. Is all this really expensive compared to other services?

I personally wouldn't know where to start as Apple does offer a lot in one bundle. How much that bundle is worth to a given person really depends on what they actually use, not what they supposedly get but don't use. If you just need email and a small personal web site, you can have your own domain and buy hosting for about $20 a year. The service I use offers plans such that for each $1/mo you spend, you get 1GB storage and 10GB transfer.

Then there's the syncing and some other services, which I am unfamiliar with the details of Apple's service and unaware of what else that might provide anything like it.

I think a lot of different products and services can be used to piece together the equivalent of an alternative, but I don't think anyone else offers a cohesive package that's as simple as Apple's should be.

What are you talking about?

MS sold over 20 million Win mobile licenses this past year, and Symbian commands about 50% of all smartphone sales.

RIM has been making good progress in gaining non business sales as well.

Apple hasn't made much of a dent in these companies yet. It's secondary companies that are feeling the heat so far, such as Sony_Ericcson.

Give it another year, and then we will see it happen, as long as Apple can fix their problems with it.

That's one backup plan. It's why I don't have an iPhone yet. You all (those who have been here) know why I didn't buy the first. I'm waiting for the kinks to be worked out of the new one, as well as the services.

I never feel sorry for people who rush into new things, and get slammed by problems. There is far too much of the "I gotta be the first" these days. It's ok with game machines, but not for this.


I'm surprised. It's all over the news, and it's been happening since the beginning. Releasing customer data has been a very big problem for them as well.


Don't be so sure. Ads are Googles biggest revenue source. They could easily be making several hundred million on ads in Gmail. They made billions on ads this past quarter. It's where all online services are going. Not that they don't make money on clicks as well. But clicks are generally coming from ads.

It's also the fact that it's an Apple product, and people are willing to pay for the .mac, or whatever. Personally, I'd be embarrassed by it. I like my Macs and all, and I do have a fair amount of stock, but the fanboy label people will give one for having that address is something I'd rather do without.

And if you have a businessvery unprofessional. Sort of the same reaction I would have when someone handed me their business card, and their address ended in aol.

I've had .Mac since 2003 and have only used my .Mac address as an alternative email address for things i knew or assumed would provoke unwanted emails. In the past there was plenty of spam but Apple seems to taken care of that aspect quite deftly.

I am now using my @mac.com address on my iPhone to get my mail Pushed, which is forwarded from Gmail. This is working out quite well. I even have have the outgoing email and SMTP server as Gmail so it's invisible to all. Except for Push, the email is the least useful aspect of MobileMe for me. Hopefully Gmail will implement their own Push, but I doubt it and it will probably be as shoddy as Yahoo's free Push if they do.

I can't fault you at all for that.


I guess I just don't see them. I tried a search, but none really turn up anything where they lose emails.

Maybe there is a lesson there, news reports might not actually represent a typical user's experience.


A valid concern with that and associated things, but that's a separate issue from service reliability.


I think ads are by far most of Google's revenue, but what does the service earn them per user-year?

I have no problem with spam either. I use usa.net for my address, which is what I give out. They send my mails to my provider covad.net.

Both do filtering, which I can set. usa.net has services I can use, which I sometimes do.

What I find is that I get about 5 real spams a day, and about another 5 or 6 that are related to things I do. Mostly, they go to my spam folder, where I can look at them.

When I check what usa.net is filtering, it's about 30 to 50 spams a day, nothing that I should be getting. covad.net filters out the rest that get through before they reach my spam folder. This is fine, and I use my address for everything, and go everywhere with it, including some adult sites some of my former clients (who are in that business) gave me (I know, I know!).

That's a very good question, and I don't know if they break that out.

AND

I'm talking sales - sorry about the rather unfortunate typo - not market share, which really isn't the best metric for the current success of products as there's no way to tell if that install base has changed - for instance, it doesn't note people who have since replaced that device with something new.

This has already happened. It occurred when the first gen iPhone was launched and iPhone sales have only increased exponentially since then.

Here's an excerpt from an article on the sales report, which was published by none other than Symbian.

In its first full quarter of sales, the iPhone has already climbed past Microsoft’s entire lineup of Windows Mobile smartphones in North America, according to figures compiled by Canalys and published by Symbian. That puts the iPhone ahead of smartphones running Symbian, Linux, and the Palm OS, but behind the first place RIM BlackBerry. The figures mesh with retail sales data already reported by NPD, which similarly described the size of the US market with a 27% chunk bit out by Apple’s iPhone.

You can read the rest of the article HERE.

Well, a few days ago there was a link posted on these forums (I think it was the Prystar thread) to a test case where the judge ruled that even although the software vendors claimed they were selling you a license to use the software, and you had to agree to a EULA before using the software, from a legal standpoint, the transaction was actually a sale rather than a license.

This has interesting repercussions outwith the copyright sphere, and we start to get into some interesting territory on the sale of goods side.

In the UK at least, software companies could ship buggy code, and then hide behind the fact that the buyer had simply purchased a license which entitled them to run the buggy code. You were essentially buying a license to use a product without any guarantee of the products quality.

But if the transaction is indeed a sale, then the vendor has a responsibility to provide goods which are 'fit for use'.

Sorry, I don't mean to hijack the thread, but I thought it was worth pointing out the distinction.

The difference is when Google, Yahoo or Microsoft screw up I have an out. I leave their service. When Apple screws me, they keep my money. Yes $79 bucks a year is chump change... but it is my chump change. It is two more hours Im sitting at work, it is half the price on a new low end ipod, it is almost a month of ATT service on my iphone or it might fill up my tank with gas. So Free does matter and when you SELL people something you have a higher obligation to perform.

A question for other .mac users - do you regularly receive emails addressed to other .mac users?

I often get spam addressed to people who have a similar username as mine @mac.com

I always thought that was strange, and wondered who else was receiving my emails in error?

That article has been around for a while, and is biased. Yes, in the USA the iPhone made a quick rise at first, but overall sales are still well behind the others. Nokia hardly competes here, so it doesn't matter that they have almost no smartphone sales here. MS competes around the world.

We really need another year to pass, now that the iPhone is beginning to compete worldwide, to really know anything useful.

That was for just the ONE case. That involved Autodesk. It is still in appeal.

Sorry, but I don't consider a free service to have any error points just because it's free. If a service is being offered that has the potential to screw up people's data, or fail at an inopportune time, then the vendor has the same responsibilities to make sure it is reliable.

You can't say, "Oh well, you lost all of your mails, but what the hell, it was free!", and expect most people to feel better because of that.

Every service, paid or not, has problems. If paying was the sole criteria to determine whether it was ok to screw up or not, no one would be using paid apps if they didn't care about the screwups, because they were free. This is clearly not the case.

My point is not that APPLE has equal responsibilities to attempt to make sure its service is working properly, but that it is WE who can't expect a paid service to have less bugs because of the fact that it is paid for.

Software is software, and servers are just another electro-mechanical device that breaks down, gets corrupted, and overloaded.

As I said before, Apple miscalculated. You can be sure they did their best to not have it happen.

I'm also pretty sure that they are doing their damndest to fix the problems as fast as possible.

The only e-mail I've received was legitimately addressed to me...and I've been a .Mac user from the beginning.

Now I have infrequently gotten e-mail not intended for me when the sender mistyped the address (and got mine). Hardly Apple's fault!

What sort of Release Management do they have ? 70 bugs in a production environment ? Who signs off the releases - who is in charge of Change Management and Quality Assurance ?

Even w/o ITIL knowledge/cert. one should know better then this.

That server crumble under lots of traffic - OK. That can happen. But releasing 70 bugs in a production software is worse then M$....

Precisely. This was a strange occurrence because Apple is noted for extraordinary execution. There is an advantage to having a whole industry working for you (the PC world) and having to do it all yourself (Apple). The fact that the WWDC keeps growing and so rapidly now may induce Apple to support key players much better than it has done so and thus derive the benefit of "more hands." One gets the feeling that Apple has crossed a threshold and its manpower and abilities to do large jobs at once is getting taxed. Yet, this is precisely the issue that will make Enterprise step back a moment and question whether Apple is ready to go head to toe with MS.

Let's hope SJ's supposed recent awareness that his views on life required a readjustment translate into a broader ecumenical approach from Apple and that the vast amount of human power so contained could be used to propel Apple to viably challenge MS as the dominant OS. It is possible-- even though so many IT people can't or won't admit it-- the same people who have had Apple interred for the last 10 years!

I believe that I have heard, during roll outs and big events, that .Mac and iLife were being used by businesses. I would be surprised if the marketing people in Apple were not recommending Apple services to small businesses. So this hurts more than people imagine, Apple was hoping to make some inroads in the enterprise markets with iPhone 2.0 software. That is why they had fortune 500 companies test the product and even have a solution for distributing software for companies. This just goes to show that Apple cannot be relied on for this service. Unfortunately by launching all things together the flaws of one are all tied to the launch event not to the particular service. Also how many businesses would like to hear that because the iPhone is so popular that they will have outages and may have to schedule their updates and software distributions around Apple launches. So for me an AAPL investor I see that the company worked so hard to get enterprise IT to pay attention only to have this happen. The launch incident cost Apple big time, and the on going incident is costing Apple big time.

Also 70 bugs may not be many for this type of software and service, but the ones that we are reading about appear to be big bugs. For example if I wrote an app and it was very big and very complex and only had one bug would you be impressed? What if the one bug was that on launching 1% to 3% would lose everything, 10% to 20% would lose something, and an unknown % would lose their account information, and nearly 100% would suffer outages. But hey it is only 1 bug.

Point is this should have been beta tested before release to the general public. I blame the RDF for this. They could have had people testing mobileme for months if it weren't for the level of secrecy required to generate the RDF--and sites like this one.

What the article says and whatever bias you think it has is irrelevant. Robots don't report the news, fallible humans do. It's what the Canalys compiled, Symbian-published report tells us about smart phone sales that's important.

It was linked to in the article, but here's the link:
http://www.symbian.com/about/fastfacts/fastfacts.html