MobileMe

MobileMe and Downtime

Today I got the following email:

We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around. Read this article for more details.

The MobileMe Team

Now, I realize that the transition to MobileMe from .Mac hasn’t been a seamless one.  But honestly, I’ve barely noticed any blips in service.  Sure, there were a couple of days there where I needed to use webmail instead of Mail.app or Entourage.  But overall, the transition has been performed with minimal downtime considering the quantity of accounts and systems in play.  So now, given that their poor engineers are likely sweating bullets and wondering who gets canned the next time there’s downtime, MobileMe goes ahead and gives away 90 days of service for free.  It’s nice that Apple has deep pockets to do so, but I really, really hope that it doesn’t come with deprecated service given that they just arguably lost 25% of their revenue for a fiscal year…

So, if you’re thinking this transition is a fiasco please, think about the amount of downtime over the course of the last few years that .Mac has encountered.  Consider the fact that for the same price you’re going to have tons of new features and consider the fact that there’s basically always downtime in an upgrade.  I mean, if you were replacing all of the RAIDs in an Xsan wouldn’t you expect there to be a little downtime while the data is copying from your old volume to the new?