When Apple announced MobileMe back in June and announced that it would be replacing .Mac with a far superior service, I for one was excited. At last, .Mac/MobileMe was actually worth something. (I still think $99/year is a bit pricey, but I’m willing to live with that here.) In fact, if I wasn’t doing all of my stuff from one single computer, if I had one of Apple’s handheld devices, and if I actually had money to spend, I would have purchased MobileMe the very first day.
Boy, am I glad that I’m dirt poor right now.
As completely strange as it might seem, it appears that Apple has flubbed up MobileMe in every conceivable way these past few weeks. Take first the fact that it took about three times as long for the .Mac-to-MobileMe transition to take place (leaving many many .Mac users without any access to vital .Mac services that they needed for a few days), then throw in the whole ongoing fiasco with the so-called “1%” who lost use of their e-mail and actually lost a few days worth of their e-mail in the process. Many of these people weren’t even people who signed up for MobileMe, they signed up for .Mac, and were not expecting MobileMe to happen or for them to have to go through this. I mean, I can see something like this happening to a free service, but when Apple is getting $99/year from these people, that’s pretty ridiculous. Plus the fact that Apple was completely tight-lipped about this for nearly a week says some pretty bad things about how Apple handles its services and its customers.
Now, today, it turns up that Apple is limiting support to those people who were part of that 1%, and only people whom Apple thinks was on that 1%, according to TUAW. I mean, for the love of Pete, has Apple considered that other people may have other problems with MobileMe too? Just this morning, my friend Daniel Brusilovsky was trying to get support through one of those online live support things. After just saying “hi” to the support representative before even having a chance to type his question, the support guy said “Sorry, I can’t help you with this issue, I can only help with MobileMe Mail,” and closed the chat connection. What gives?
Apple, I know that you’re all big and successful now with all of the Macs, iPods, and (now) iPhones you’re selling, but it appears you’re starting to let that go to your head. If you want to be able to rebuild the already-ruined reputation that MobileMe has garnered, you’re going to have to do a lot more things correctly, and you’re going to have to start with the way you treat your paying customers. Otherwise, I’m not giving you a single blood-red penny.
Tags: Apple, e-mail, Mac, MobileMe, outage, reputation, ripoff, support
