MobileMe "Not up to Apple's Standards," Says Steve Jobs
We all know that Apple's MobileMe had a difficult birth: but it's quite another thing to be able to read the criticisms of the service from his Steveness himself. And over at Ars Technica they've got hold of an internal Apple email that Steve Jobs sent out to Apple employees detailing his displeasure that MobileMe was "not up to Apple's Standards." It needed both more time in testing, and a piece-by-piece launch, rather than attempting to launch it as a "monolithic service," he thinks.
Perhaps most interesting of all is the fact that Steve thinks "it was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store," which is an admission that perhaps Apple had bitten off more than they could chew. "We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence." That's pretty evident, and clearly something that Apple needs to keep an eye on in the future.
History looks much clearer with the benefit of hindsight, but it also looks like Steve has acted to protect future MobileMe development with a restructuring of the team. The team now reports to a chap called Eddy Cue (his name has appeared connected to iTunes in the past) who in turn will report directly to Steve. In fact, Eddy is now in charge of all web-related services, including iTunes and the App Store. That sounds eminently sensible, but leaves us wondering what the structure was like before? And what happened to the exec formerly in charge of MobileMe did they get the chop?
Steve closes by being frank about the lack-lustre start to MobileMe's life: "The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services." But clearly he intends Apple to learn from its mistakes and not trip up in the same way again: "And learn we will." [Ars Technica]
, then played around with safari, twitterific, MLB At Bat and am now listening to Tuner Internet Radio.
