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Michael Gartenberg on the Lessons Apple Learned (and Hopefully Has Not Forgotten) From MobileMe
Sebastiaan de With, on X, linking to my “Something Is Rotten” piece last week: Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time. It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the ones who gave us MobileMe!” Michael Gartenberg (who worked at Apple in product marketing for a few years at the tail end of the Jobs era), responded (across two tweets): When I was at Apple and Apple University was still around there was a whole course on MobileMe and how it was possible that things ended up the way they did. Fascinating to hear all the backstory. One of the lessons of the Apple University course was much of the MobileMe debacle was directly because Jobs didn’t care about it. He was too preoccupied with the newest iPhone at the time. He didn’t even introduce the product, a lot of the stuff crossed his desk that he ignored. Twitter-like social posts enforce brevity, but I suspect Gartenberg would agree that it wasn’t that Jobs didn’t care about MobileMe at all. It was that he didn’t think he had to care enough to devote his personal attention to it. Yes, Apple should offer web-based functionality for some online fundamentals (email, calendar, contacts...) and, more importantly, Apple should provide over-the-air Internet sync for that data between customers’ devices. And it should just work, in the way that a hard drive “just works” without Steve Jobs paying close attention to the current state of Apple’s file system team. But then it turned out MobileMe didn’t “just work”, and Jobs decided that he needed to pay laser-focused attention to starting over and building what we now know as iCloud (which is really quite good, very reliable, and I’d say long ago surpassed the “it just works” threshold). Steve Jobs’s final keynote — at WWDC 2011 — was largely focused on the announcement of iCloud. Who’s got that role inside Apple today — someone with high standards, good taste, and clout within the company — for Siri and Apple Intelligence? Someone who is going to say We didn’t care enough about this, but now we need to, and will. ★
Sebastiaan de With, on X, linking to my “Something Is Rotten” piece last week:
Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time.
It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the ones who gave us MobileMe!”
Michael Gartenberg (who worked at Apple in product marketing for a few years at the tail end of the Jobs era), responded (across two tweets):
When I was at Apple and Apple University was still around there was a whole course on MobileMe and how it was possible that things ended up the way they did. Fascinating to hear all the backstory.
One of the lessons of the Apple University course was much of the MobileMe debacle was directly because Jobs didn’t care about it. He was too preoccupied with the newest iPhone at the time. He didn’t even introduce the product, a lot of the stuff crossed his desk that he ignored.
Twitter-like social posts enforce brevity, but I suspect Gartenberg would agree that it wasn’t that Jobs didn’t care about MobileMe at all. It was that he didn’t think he had to care enough to devote his personal attention to it. Yes, Apple should offer web-based functionality for some online fundamentals (email, calendar, contacts...) and, more importantly, Apple should provide over-the-air Internet sync for that data between customers’ devices. And it should just work, in the way that a hard drive “just works” without Steve Jobs paying close attention to the current state of Apple’s file system team. But then it turned out MobileMe didn’t “just work”, and Jobs decided that he needed to pay laser-focused attention to starting over and building what we now know as iCloud (which is really quite good, very reliable, and I’d say long ago surpassed the “it just works” threshold). Steve Jobs’s final keynote — at WWDC 2011 — was largely focused on the announcement of iCloud.
Who’s got that role inside Apple today — someone with high standards, good taste, and clout within the company — for Siri and Apple Intelligence? Someone who is going to say We didn’t care enough about this, but now we need to, and will.
