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Steve Jobs: MobileMe Launched Too Early
August 5th, 2008 : Rich MillerIn an internal e-mail sent to Apple employees (and leaked to Ars Technica), Steve Jobs says that the troubled MobileMe hosting service was launched too early and “not up to Apple’s standards.” An excerpt from the Jobs email:
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. The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet service. 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.
The service, which is a successor to the .mac hosting service, has experienced repeated problems with uptime and lost e-mails, resulting in multiple apologies.
Apple definitely needs to re-think its approach to performance management in light of the repeated problems with MobilMe. Nothing inhibits mass adoption quicker than repeated brownouts and blackouts. A company as innovative as Apple should definitely look beyond traditional monitoring and performance management approaches to real time analytics solutions. Analytics-based performance management solutions can reduce the massive manual efforts that go into reactive firefighting and can predict outages and other performance problems hours before they affect end users. These solutions can also point IT staff to most likely root cause so that problems can be fixed and re-occurrences eliminated. Todays vast and complex IT infrastructures supporting services like MobilMe require new solutions to proactively manage performance. Its either that or your reputation suffers and mass adoption is out the window. This will be the death of more than one online service that is for sure.
