The IT Nerd

I just saw this new posting on the MobileMe status page that says the following:

“Some MobileMe members may be unable to sync new, edited, or deleted contacts, calendars, and bookmarks over the air between computers and mobile devices (iPhone and iPod Touch). Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

This should do nothing to make people want to use MobileMe and rely upon it. If that’s the case, how can Apple expect users to trust it with anything else they make?

MobileMe has been a total mess since it was launched and Apple has been taking its hits over this disaster. But apparently there’s news both of the good and bad variety.

The good news: Service is slowly being restored for the “1%” of users (which works out to about 20,000 users) who were affected with e-mail problems.

The bad news: Users may not have access to e-mails prior to July 18th (the date this mess started) for the time being. On top of that, they may not be able to access their e-mail from their desktop e-mail clients (either Outlook on the PC or Mail on the Mac). Oh yeah, Apple also admits that while the majority of email messages will be fully restored, approximately 10% of messages received between 5:00 a.m. PDT on July 16th and 10:20 a.m. PDT on July 18th have been lost. Finally, users shouldn’t change their password for the time being.

This was posted in an updated support note on Apple’s website.

Also, in an effort to keep users from leaving MobileMe as well as keeping the press and Apple fanbois from bad mouthing Apple keeping their users informed, there are now daily status updates from the MobileMe team at the request of “The Steve.”

Clearly this crisis has reached a critical point and Apple are now finally starting to react to it in a way that I would have expected them to do much sooner. This is not the Apple that I have seen in the past. As a result, I believe that you will see Apple’s public perception suffer. Whether this will be a long term problem remains to be seen.

You know that you’re in deep trouble when your biggest fanboi booster tells the world to pass on one of your products. Example: Walt Mossberg (an Apple fanboi booster of the highest order) of the Wall Street Journal has come out with an article called “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed To Be Reliable.”

Ouch.

According to Mossberg, even discounting the amount of trouble Apple has been having keeping MobileMe up, the service doesn’t work well to begin with:

“But in my tests, using two Macs, two Dell (DELL) computers and two iPhones, I ran into problem after problem. One big issue is that while changes made on the Web site or the iPhone are instantly pushed to the computers, changes made on computers are only synced every 15 minutes, at best. Apple has admitted that this is a problem, and says it is working on it.

But there’s more. The Web site was sluggish, and occasionally calendar entries wouldn’t load at all. Sometimes, you have to manually refresh the Web pages to see changes made on your devices. And when I tried to open my Web-based file-storage page directly from the MobileMe control panel on Windows, I got an error message on both Dells.”

I can’t imagine how this could possibly get any worse for Apple. Jobs really has to start rallying the troops or maybe pull a Ballmer and start throwing some chairs or something to get MobileMe up to Apple’s usual standards.

UPDATE: It’s now worse. Apple’s #2 fanboi booster David Pogue has put the boots to MobileMe as well.

UPDATE #2: The downward spiral continues for Apple. Information Week and the Washington Post get their kicks in.

You’ll recall that I posted about the troubles of MobileMe yesterday, and it just gets worse for Apple. This document has appeared on Apple’s support site admitting that MobileMe email is problematic:

“On Friday, July 18, 2008 ( 2008-07-18 ) we experienced a serious issue with one of our MobileMe mail servers. This issue is currently affecting approximately 1% of MobileMe members. Affected members are unable to send or receive email at http://www.me.com or access email using any email client software such as Mail on a Mac or Microsoft Outlook on a PC.”

The fact that Apple has to post something like this means that it’s way more serious than they are letting on. The optics of this don’t look good and all of the apologies and extensions of subscriptions won’t matter if the service isn’t working.

Apple’s new MobileMe service has had some serious probems since its launch alongside the new iPhone. Just to bring you up to speed, MobileMe is Apple’s new $99/year service which replaces .Mac and offers customers web-based email, calendar, address book, online storage as well as sync services for computers and iPhones. Here’s the highlights of all of the problems the service has had since it launched on July 10th:

• The service has been up and down since July 10th leaving users without access to e-mail among other MobileMe services.
• Apple then had to backtrack on its promise of “push” services (meaning instant syncing of calendars, contacts and other data) by admitting that syncs only happen every 15 minutes.
• Apple then tried to play nice by giving MobileMe customers a 30 day extension to their subscriptions.
• Now it seems that some MobileMe users are still without e-mail after some sort of partial outage that has lasted 4 days. According to Apple this problem only affects 1% of users, but that doesn’t seem right given the amount of people who seem ticked off on Apple’s discussion boards.

This comes after the somewhat rocky launch of the new iPhone that left some customers iRate when they couldn’t activate their phones. All of this takes the shine off of Apple’s acendancy up the computing food chain thanks to the blunder that is failure of Vista to gain traction in the marketplace. They really need to get their act together in a hurry or they may find their momentum stalled, if not reversed.