Compelling comparison, I think.
Wow, in a brilliant display of technological egotism, Apple launched the MobileMe service way too early, at a time when their servers were already destined for failure, and of course it failed, big time, right along with the famed ’second coming’ of the JesusiPhone. Even now, weeks later, MoblieMe has turned out to be a largely disappointing service from many perspectives.
At least Jobs is now admiting the MobileMe failure, if only to Apple employees.
Here’s an excerpt of a story… now imagine multiplying this by 10’s of thousands, probably millions of iPhone users. Apple and AT&T have happily cashed the checks, but once again their poor planning has obviously left the customers up the creek, so to speak.
Here’s how it went down:
The very first person in line (who had camped out for days) came storming out of the store very upset. His iPhone simply could not be activated (see the video below). A friend of mine, Matthew Levine, then came over to explain that he had tried to upgrade his old iPhone to the 2.0 software in the morning, and it rendered his iPhone unusable (this is also in the video below, though the audio seems to have failed for some reason):
Shortly thereafter, Apple seemed to have corrected the system for some. One man walked out with a working iPhone (see the video below):
I was in the second wave of customers (about the 30th person in line throughout the night) allowed to enter the store. It was clear immediately that things were still very wrong. In the video below, blogger Robert Scoble storms out of the store after failing to secure a phone (see the video below):
I purchased an iPhone shortly after him. The first troublesome sign? The credit card machine didn’t work. Fair enough, sometimes these things break. It had to be done manually (you know, the old carbon-copy method).
I was then taken downstairs to activate my new iPhone. Four employees tried and failed to do so on two different machines. Different error messages popped up every time. No one had a clue what the problem was.
I was handed my iPhone and told to try again “later” at home. That was annoying since I had just waited for over nine hours in line, but hey, maybe this is the price of early adoption, right?
You can read the full story here: http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/11/great-iphone-3g-ifail-retrospective-videos#comment-2821
And there’s more stories here too: http://holgr.com/blog/2008/07/13/iphone-3g-mobileme-ifail-and-the-conspiracy-theory/trackback/