MobileMe Working Perfectly For Me

With all the frenzied attacks against Apple’s MobileMe service over the past few days, I think it’s time people stood back and looked at the situation with a little perspective. There seems to be a certain salivation going on amongst certain corners of the internet at the thought of Apple having screwed up in such a big and public way. It’s become something of a vindication for all those nerds hiding under their keyboards who’ve had a pent up longing to say “I told you so” about Apple over something for years but couldn’t find anything big enough. Certainly MobileMe’s failings have been pretty public and for the 1% of users who’ve suffered an email outage, or worse, email loss, I suspect they’ll be hard pressed to ever fully trust the service again. But what about the other 99%? I hate to tell you this, especially to all those who’ve written some story over the past week with the words “Apple” and “Rotten” in the title, but Mobile Me is working perfectly fine for me.

I have several email addresses, and have done so for the past few years. I have a work email address for the company I work for. My web hosting gives me several addresses and I also have a gmail account and of course a .mac, now a .me address. In the last 3 years, my .mac email address has been the most reliable. All of the other email services, all of which are paid for apart from gmail, have had an outage of some description at one time or another. Some fairly regularly. Most service providers have down time now and again. Bugs happen. If you think the massive complexity needed to host email for millions of users is foolproof then you really shouldn’t be on the internet. It’s how the company handles these problems that is most important, and Apple have, in my opinion done as much if not more than most other companies would have, in my experience.

Take this website for example. When I first moved over to my current provider, media temple they were having some problems with their clustered hosting service. This site was down several times and once or twice for a protracted period. But they were providing a fairly new and revolutionary service so I stuck with it. On top of that they refunded a months service for the few days that the hosting was down, and they also have a blog with regular service updates. That seemed perfectly reasonable to me and I’m still with what I find to be an excellent hosting company.

Apple have done pretty much the same. They have had a massive roll out. Lets not underestimate that. The scale of mobile me for a single event switch over was a hugely ambitious project and unfortunately it didn’t work. Since then they’ve offered a free months service for everyone on mobile me, and I understand additional remuneration for that 1% effected. While there was the typical Apple silence at first, since the last few days they’ve also been incredibly open about the issues affecting the service and the work they’re doing to fix it. People put up with service interruptions from their hosting providers as the technological norm but when it’s Apple that’s at fault it’s the beginning of the Apocalypse.

I am not in any way trying to belittle the problems of those who are suffering. It’s incredibly frustrating when your email isn’t working, I understand that. If I was one of those people I’d be pissed. However, the most vocal of those doing the complaining are not. They are bloggers and wannabe journalists looking to have a go at Apple and this has been a great opportunity for them to rebel against the perceived reality distortion field with a distorted reality of their own. If you’re one of those affected my sympathy goes out to you. It’s a pain and nothing anyone can say apart from “your email’s working again” will make you feel better, but for everyone else, for the love of god calm down. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not the microsoftization of Apple, it’s a large and unfortunate technological hiccup that will be resolved, hopefully sooner rather than later, and in a few months or so everyone will have forgotten about it. In the mean time I just have to reiterate, that for me and several hundred thousand others, mobile me is working just fine.

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