Steve Jobs to Employees: MobileMe? My Bad

MobileMe's launch has been anything but smooth. It was so bad that Apple has even offered a 30-day extension to those whose accounts were active as of July 9, 2008. Personally, they should just do the right thing and give everyone an extension, up until they finally bless the service as "fixed."

However, Steve Jobs sets high standards, not just for his employees, but for himself and the company as a whole, and in an internal email that Ars Technica said they had viewed, he fessed up: My Bad. Well, Our Bad, but with caveats.

For one, Jobs admitted that rather than launching the whole service at once, they could have launched it in pieces (no!), such as launching the over-the-air iPhone syncing first, and then each web app (Mail, Calendar, etc) separately.

He added:

"It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence."

Well, yeah! The iPhone 3G launch itself was a fiasco, right? Why add still more complexity?

It's been so bad Apple's even put up a status page, although it hasn't been updated since July 29th.

Note: the first MobileMe bug I found was so embarassingly easy, I thought, "how did this make it out the door?" I couldn't login unless my ID was entered in all lower-case, despite signing up with an upper-case first letter. Sigh.

Update: A few hours after the Ars Technica story, settB.IT published the email in its entirety (in bitmap form), and we managed to snag a copy from an anonymous source. The email said:

Team,

The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour. There are several things we could have done better:

– MobileMe was simply not up to Apple's standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

– Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we 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. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love. One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services – iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe. Eddy's new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me.

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Steve