Immobile me: An idle thought
I love Apple as much as the next guy. Probably more than the next guy. But today has been another day on which — as the .Mac outage report clinically put it — “100% of members were unable to access mail using an IMAP client.”
You can read some less clincal reactions 
from .Mac users on Apple Discussions.
Apple are very good at sending nicely produced, well-polished emails about new Apple hardware and software products and new items in the iTunes Store. It obviously spends money and effort in producing them. It cares about these things.
How hard would it be to send an email to .Mac users warning that “scheduled maintenance” is about to take place over an eight or twelve (or whatever) hour window, and that connectivity to .Mac services may be affected?
Fastmail can do it. Joyent can do it. The IT Department at my work can do it.
Of course, it is possible that Apple didn’t know everything would go pear-shaped. Someone tripped over a power cord and all the lights went out.
So, I am stuck in the horns of a dilemma. Is it more troubling that Apple doesn’t care enough to warn users beforehand, or that its mail engineers don’t know what they are doing?
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Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, dotmac, mac, mail.app, outage
June 4th, 2008 at 1:33 am
With the wave of me.com, .me, and .mac rebranding stories you have to wonder if this is all part of the latest Apple viral marketing play. Yes it’s insane to think poor service is great marketing. But sign up now for our new and improved .me service!
June 4th, 2008 at 2:29 am
And that is why I use Gmail – and it’s free!
June 4th, 2008 at 5:52 am
Wow – every service has its hiccups but if Apple is going to revamp and publicize their .Mac service as the various rumors suggest (Me.com?) then this isn’t very good publicity.
June 4th, 2008 at 6:05 am
Or is it that Apple is revamping .mac to solve all of these problems once and for all? And in the process of revamping a whole service there has been an outage… Read some rumor sites… Next week we’ll now more…
June 4th, 2008 at 6:30 am
In some ways Apple reminds me now of the old Commodore of Commodore 64 and Amiga fame. The company could truly put out great products but that’s as far as it went. Commodore back then wanted to only stay in the consumer field where they could release a product and not have to really support it much. They had the video field to themselves but wanted nothing to do with supporting businesses that used it.
Apple strikes me similarly these days. The big thing back then that Commodore was routinely criticized for besides their lack of support was that they would not market anything and if they did it was very half-assed. That’s where Apple has the upperhand in the comparisons.
Don’t get me wrong I like Apple but there’s a reason I’ve never gotten a .mac account and it’s not just about cost. What little services they offer are too valuable to trust that they would run them effectively/reliably and put some effort into it. Not only that but if Apple can’t get that right how can business and enterprise customers trust them. You only have to look through their forums and see that Leopard as a server OS has been pretty disastrous.
Apple = consumer company(and I still recall Steve Jobs in an interview talking before coming back to Apple that he would milk the Mac for all it’s worth)
June 4th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Perhaps they’re getting ready to launch Me.Com (see http://snurl.com/2cpkt)
June 4th, 2008 at 8:57 am
I suspect that it relates to the rebranding of .Mac too, which makes me prefer the “knave” side of the “knave or fool” dilemma.
That is, Apple knew the outage would occur but didn’t think to warn users in some general, non-specific way beforehand (knave), rather than making something bad happen that they weren’t expecting (fool).
June 4th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
I also think that this has something to do with the rebranding.
However, I see some negative comments about the already existing .Mac service in the comments for this post. I have to say that I’m quite happy with .Mac. Everything could be a little bit faster, but features like syncing or the (sometimes) sluggish iDisk are killer features in my opinion. I agree that you could get everything from places like GMail, Dropbox etc. but here you have everything from one provider and it’s tightly integrated into the system – that’s a big plus. Everything .Mac offers isn’t perfect, but it’s acceptable if you ask me. I don’t know providers who are perfect at all.