The Adventures of AlisterComputeron

In case you’ve been off the grid for a couple weeks, you haven’t heard that Apple’s MobileMe service is getting hammered in the press and in the blogosphere.  Bloggers like myself to journalists and reviewers like normally-Apple-friendly Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal are giving the service bad reviews left and right.  Walt’s summation is “MobileMe is far to flawed to be reliable.”

There are problems with the MobileMe web site, which is still slow for some users.  And Apple’s push technology isn’t exactly push, it’s more like sync, and users are waiting sometimes several minutes for calendar items and email to push from the MobileMe to the devices or vice-versa.

Even great companies with great products slip up once in a while.  I’m not really surprised to see these problems, because the .Mac service was kind of a “second thought” to Apple.  I’m not sure where they got tripped up withMobileMe : maybe they thought everything would work, maybe they didn’t think as many people would be wanting to use the service.  I don’t know, I’m just speculating.

Ah! Conspiracy theory alert! Perpahs Apple botched the whole MobileMe launch on purpose, so they could show consumers that they can fix their problems, and be a stronger contrast to Microsoft’s perceived inability to fix things, i.e., Vista.

Now I’m just being ridiculous.

But here is, indeed, an opportunity for Apple to show the world that they can fix a problem with one of their products or services.  I expect to see Apple in the coming weeks or months to put some real effort into fixing these problems with MobileMe.  Because if they don’t put in some effort, and it they don’t tell the world about it, then MobileMe will face the same images problems that Vista has faced.