No way she worked on MobileMe
Dan Lyons recently wrote about a mysterious blog posting he came across which appeared to detail the internal corporate aftermath of the MobileMe rollout/fiasco/debacle.
The mystery blogger, known only as Ethlite, laid out a scenario that could easily be interpreted as coming from Cupertino’s MobileMe HQ about 2 months ago:
“The predictable fallout ensued, with a dressing down by our CEO, followed by the usual finger pointing and finally ending in removal/demotion of some members of the senior management team. “
Lyons went so far as to contact Apple and confirm that Ethlite did indeed work on the MobileMe team, and was given the affirmative. Since his posting, all traces of Ethlite on the web have disappeared. flickr, myspace, blogspot, friendfeed, facebook… she seems to be trying to erase any online link to her true identity, although at this point we’d wager it is a little too late for that.
However despite Lyons’ apparent “confirmation” that Ethlite was an Apple employee, we have our doubts. Mac site theapplelounge has re-posted the Ethlite’s full blog posting (which had been deleted) in its entirety, and we must say, from the first opening lines it’s pretty obvious she isn’t talking about MobileMe:
“About two months ago, the group I work for suffered one of the worst product launch failures in its history. In fact, not just the group, but for the company. A very high profile product failed to launch on the day and then continued to fail for an agonizing week afterwards.”
You see? Right there! She said “agonizing week afterwards”. Week. Single. Everyone knows MobileMe’s rollout sucked for about 3 weeks. Case closed. She’s obviously talking about the rollout of some sort of cigarettes marketed towards children with Asthma or something. So let’s end all the speculation.
Apple threatens MobileMe customers with an additional 60 free days of service - haven’t we all suffered enough?
Apple has announced that in order to make up for the numerous and seemingly unsolvable glitches running rampant throughout their MobileMe service, they will be offering yet another free 2 month extension to MobileMe subscribers in addition to the 30 day extension they already have doled out.
To me this like going to a restaurant and ordering a thick, juicy steak, only to be served a rancid bowl of overcooked broccoli instead. The out comes an apologetic waiter carrying out 2 more bowls of broccoli to make amends for the mistake instead of just bringing out that steak you ordered in the first place.
Actually, I think if I tried a little harder I could come up with a better steak-based analogy, but suffice it to say, Read more
Apple: “We still have no idea why MobileMe isn’t working”
Remember when “David G.” started that MobileMe status blog at the personal request of Steve Jobs to keep everyone up-to-date on MobileMe’s flaky outages? “Be assured people here are working 24-7 to improve matters,” wrote David, “and we’re going to favor getting you new info hot off the presses even if we have to post corrections or further updates later.”
Well, that first post was July 25th, followed by a quick update on July 27th, followed by another on July 29th. So far, so good. Unfortunately, that July 29th entry was followed by… nothing. Yes, the July 29th post, which ended with the line “Next post later this week” has been the last update for nearly 3 weeks now, and some folks who are still experiencing daily outages, such as faithful Macenstein reader drfunk, have gotten fed up.
“I sent an email to Steve Jobs and Eddie Cue complaining about MobileMe telling them that after 4+ years using my .mac as my work email, I have to change it because its flat out just not reliable. Well someone from Steve’s office called me, actually, and they’re getting me some sort of in house support guy, sounds like he does inside tech support for them. Plus she sent me her contact info, and said feel free to reach out directly any time i have a problem. But when I talked to her, she acknowledged that they’re not putting any info out on it [the MobileMe status blog] on purpose, because they can’t iron out what is causing it. It sounds like they get one thing fixed, something else goes bad, etc…”
So, the good news here is that Apple’s MobileMe customer service seems very nice, apologetic, and about as helpful as they can be, however the bad news is that Apple still doesn’t seem to know how to get MobileMe working the way they intended for all of its customers.
I suspect a different type of “fire” will be hitting Apple’s MobileMe division soon if things don’t work themselves out soon, as in “here’s your walking papers now beat it” fire.
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