Steve Jobs is Not Asking Me to Blog
July 26th, 2008 (9:37am) Judi Sohn 9 Comments
This morning, Mike posted about how Amazon is weathering their recent technical hurricane with not only an in-depth explanation of exactly what went wrong with their Amazon S3 service last weekend, but what they’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
And then there’s Apple’s attempt to inform their customers about the ongoing issues with their new MobileMe service.
The first blog post starts with: “Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe, and I’m working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date.”
Would be comforting if we had any idea who was posting…is it the product manager or the intern who drew the short straw? We may never know.
I know that if I was paying for a service that provided me with my mobile lifeline to my email and schedule and it was performing as poorly as MobileMe has been for many users, I wouldn’t be satisfied with an update “every other day or so,” but that’s just me.
9 Comments Post your own comment
keith bohanna says: July 26th, 2008 10:34am
Agreed Judi – an anonymous posting 2 weeks after the snafu which gives a very high level view of what happened and which promises to post? A couple of times a week would allow them to keep their promise – and that is just not enough.
They are arrogant.
keith
rickg says: July 26th, 2008 11:21am
True… they should conference you in so you have up to the minute insight…
/sigh
broken memail says: July 26th, 2008 3:13pm
It’s about up to the minute insight. It’s about an a small city (200,000 people) with no communication to the outsidw world via email.
If Mac is the primary email address – some are not able to work.
We aren’t asking for up to the minute conferences – but your arrogance is typical of what we see at Apple – complete indifference to the situation and arrogance when prodded regarding why it doesn’t work.
Andrew B says: July 28th, 2008 3:24am
The anonymous poster seems to have a name, a new entry has appeared, under the guise of “David G.”.
Jake says: July 28th, 2008 8:53am
I guess I’m kind of glad I haven’t signed up for this mobileme yet. haha. It sounds awesome, and very useful, but I was worried about what intense traffic would do to an untested tool like Mobileme. I’ll give it a few more months and then my and my 3G iPhone will probably jump on there.
Jake
NoteScribe: Premier Note Taking Software
Jeff says: August 1st, 2008 1:36pm
Seems to me that the difference here is that Apple is protecting its image, while Amazon simply owned up to its mistake and moved on.
I’ll bet any of you a buck that whoever was writing the posts on the Apple blog is some PR functionary, potentially a dude (or dudette) with little tech background. Notice how he repeats the “1% of MobileMe users” in each post — to mitigate concerns that the issue was widespread enough that people who might be thinking of signing up for the service won’t do it.
Also, notice his apparent lack of concern over the fact that the datestamps on peoples’ e-mails got mixed up, and that some users might have lost some mail entirely. That’s totally unacceptable. I wouldn’t let a free service lose my mail — and people are paying for this.
I’m pretty much a “Mac guy” at this point, but I’ll never sign up for this service. The only thing about it I can’t get elsewhere is that it pushes mail to the iPhone, which Gmail can’t do (although I read somewhere they might start soon).
Jeff says: August 1st, 2008 1:37pm
Oh its a dude. He signs “David G.”
Still, I bet if it turns out that David G. is a real person who actually understands the project, I’ll still bet anyone a buck he vetted all of that stuff through the PR folks.
WebWorkerDaily » Archive Company Blogs Can Provide Big Insights « says: August 21st, 2008 12:02pm
[...] The bigger companies seem to struggle with this a bit. While I subscribe to the various Google product blogs, I find the are updated much less frequently. Meanwhile, our own Judi Sohn has written about the state of blogging at Apple. [...]
Joel says: August 21st, 2008 2:58pm
Great post. Until now, Apple has had a phone and retail store only approach to communicating with customers about support issues. I think 37signals does the best job I’ve seen yet, with their status.37signals.com site, plus email support, plus twitter now.
I just recently did a post comparing ways that Apple, Google and 37signals have responded to downtime issues.