Apple Bites

There’s a famous bit of Apple lore about the disastrous rollout of the MobileMe cloud service a few years ago. Steve Jobs gathered the MobileMe team for a big meeting, and he accused

everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article.

“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the f*** doesn’t it do that?”

Yesterday, I upgraded my lousy MobileMe account to its successor, Apple’s iCloud service. So did lots of other people, after they installed the latest version of Lion on their Macs and the newest version of iOS on their iPhones and iPads. Well, guess what? iCloud sucks, too, even after Apple spent a billion dollars on a new data center in North Carolina.

I can’t get my email and, worse yet, my calendars are have disappeared. Oh, I have them backed up — I’m not a total idiot. But every time I restore the backup, MobileMe — I mean, iCloud — hoses them again. I’ve also been told that Time Machine doesn’t make a backup of your calendars, and all I can say to that is… WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, OSCAR???

Anyway, I’m in a chat with a very nice member of the MobileMe — I mean, iCloud — tech support team. There was a two-and-a-half hour wait, which should give you some idea of the size of the clusterf*ck that is the iCloud launch. So I asked them quite honestly, “If things are this bad today, what’s going to happen tomorrow when a million people activate their new iPhone 4S’s?”

My new friend answered, “iPhone 4S will probably be the name of my migraine to be frank.”

Folks, tomorrow is gonna be ugly. I don’t see how Apple gets this thing sorted out before the weekend is over. I’d be pleased as punch to be wrong, but mark my words: Tomorrow is gonna be ugly.