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Jobs: MobileMe Missteps Mean Management Change
2:23 PM EDT Thu. Aug. 07, 2008
Formerly in charge of MobileMe, Schoeben is being replaced by Eddy Cue, vice president of iTunes, according to Ars Technica, which reprinted what it said is an e-mail from Jobs to Apple employees.
In the memo, Jobs said that Cue's new title will be vice president, Internet Services and that he will report directly to Jobs. There was no mention of Schoeben in the e-mail, and it is uncertain if he is still with the company or has been transferred to another position. Calls to Apple seeking comment were not returned.
"The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour," Jobs admitted in the e-mail. "MobileMe was simply not up to Apple's standards"it clearly needed more time and testing. There are several things we could have done better."
Schoeben had been in charge of .Mac, the online service that MobileMe replaced. Schoeben also headed up additional products such as the photo editing software Aperture that was released in February, and iLife, iWork, Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio. He reported to Sina Tamaddon, senior vice president of Applications. acording to Apple's Website.
Apple had described MobileMe as "Exchange" for the rest of us." The .Mac online service replacement provided various features including e-mail functionality, Web site publishing tools and the ability to sync personal information. Those features could be "pushed" down to the iPhone, iPod touch, Mac and PC. When changes were made on one device, the cloud automatically updated other devices.
Besieged with problems from the get-go, the Apple Website provided status reports about fixes for MobileMe problems especially e-mail outages.
On its Website Apple explained that on the day it launched MobileMe it had a lot more traffic to its servers than anticipated, and the overload resulted in the inability to access Web versions of MobileMe applications, including Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, iDisk.
"We've since added server capacity and tuned our software to scale better—i.e. behave more gracefully when traffic spikes," according to the Apple Website. "The team has also fixed over 70 bugs including one that was preventing MobileMe IMAP mail folders from syncing correctly between the web app and Mac OS X Mail or Outlook, plus others correcting display issues in Calendar and in general enhancing the performance of our Web apps."
While trying to restore e-mail outages, the company discovered a syncing bug which caused contact and calendar data to not properly sync over-the-air with iPhones and iPod touch.
In his e-mail to employees, Jobs said that rather than launch MobileMe as a "monolithic service," Apple could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the Web applications "one by one"Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts."
"It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store," said Jobs. "We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence."
