Stephen Withers
Monday, 28 July 2008 06:19
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Apple botched the .Mac to MobileMe transition and made a huge mistake by failing to keep customers informed about what was happening. It's now moving in the right direction, but the damage may already have been done.
MobileMe is Apple's bundle of Internet services that includes email, web hosting, online storage and the synchronisation of certain kinds of data between users' Macs, PCs and iPhones. It is basically a refresh and rebranding of the company's previous .Mac service, though a couple of features (web-accessible bookmarks and electronic greeting cards) were dropped.
Apple apparently ran into several problems that meant the
transition didn't go as smoothly as expected. The web site was effectively unavailable for several days (a big problem for people on the road and relying on webmail access), some people reported being unable to access their iDisks (the online storage component of the service), and others noted some disruption to mail services.
Much of the angst resulted from users being kept in the dark about what was happening. Were they doing something wrong? Was the fault at Apple's end?
Further confusion was caused by the inconsistent delivery of the MobileMe update for Mac OS X via Apple's Software Update mechanism. This was magnified when some users subsequently reported receiving a revised version the update. Neither are documented on the Apple Downloads page of the company's web site, which is where people expect to find such information.
Apple's now offering a
MobileMe status report on its main web site, presumably so it is not affected by any future outages. The main system status display is shown on users' MobileMe account page, and is therefore useless if they can't log in.
What does the new report tell us? Please turn to
page 2.
