Tuesday, September 09, 2008

fail@me.com

I've been a loyal mac.com customer for years.
I recognized the Mobile Me rollout as a travesty from the start, but as a software engineer I knew what the problem was: technically oblivious upper management had forced the release of half-baked software over the authors' objections.
So far I've held on as a loyal customer, and I have no plans to leave. For me, the price is easily worth it -- if the software works. And I genuinely believe Steve Jobs was caught off guard by the rank incompetence of his web-app management, and has cracked the whip unambiguously.
I'm not going anywhere in 2008. But hey, Steve: you promised it would get good this year, and it's already September, and:
  • Mail I've handled on my iPhone or on me.com still doesn't "push" to my Mac 12 hours later.
  • The "reply" function on me.com routinely throws the web-app into a bad state ("action not allowed").
  • Sync from my Mac to me.com to the iPhone is basically nonexistent.
Message from me to me.com: I still love you and I believe in you, even if you made a catastrophically bad call on SproutCore. But if you don't make it work@me.com by January, I'm out. Sure, you might still keep my money, since $100 for non-mail sync and not changing my email address seems like a good deal to an old fogey like me, but still: I'll find my escape hatch and sing its praises to the world, and that would be sad.
You were never exactly the best, but you always cared. Please, me dot mac dot mobile sprout dot oops dot com, pleeease don't fail.

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