August 05, 2008, 3:58 PM — Apple CEO Steve Jobs conceded in an e-mail to Apple employees that the company had made numerous mistakes during the launch of its MobileMe Internet service, saying that the service "was simply not up to Apple's standards" and that it "clearly needed more time and testing." The memo also indicates that Jobs has now transferred responsibility for the service to a different Apple executive.
The memo, first reported by Ars Technica and also obtained by Macworld, says that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who has led the iTunes team for the past several years. In fact, Cue will now head up all of Apple's Internet services including iTunes, the App Store and MobileMe. Reporting directly to Jobs, Cue's new title is Vice President, Internet Services.
MobileMe's launch was fraught with problems, including large initial downtime, an extended e-mail outage including lost messages, the inability to contact the service to sync, corruption of data, time delays in syncing the computer to MobileMe, and more. In the aftermath, Apple set up a status page on the MobileMe Web site.
The "launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour," reads Jobs' e-mail.
Jobs also suggested that Apple could have staggered the release over a couple of months. Doing so would have allowed the company to locate problems with any specific app and fix them before the next app rolled out to customers.
"It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store," Jobs wrote. "We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence."
"The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. And learn we will," the memo continues. "The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year."
