Mainly Macintosh

Apple me.com up, down, up, down, down, down

The Apple me.com web site was not up late last night as originally promised -even with the hours of slip time that were added in a last minute announcement yesterday evening.

Finally, me.com did come up. I was able to access my iDisk, which is the module that was put up by default. Not what I would have expected but not the worst choice.

I decided to click on Mail. That never came up. My browser just tried forever to finish that page. I have a lot of mail in that account's mailbox. It is IMAP, so this makes sense.

I clicked the browser's Stop button but it was disabled and that had no effect. So I exited the browser.

I waite a bit and then relauncehd the browser. The browser crashed on launch. What the heck? That was weird!

Relaunched browser and that time Browser stayed up. Tried to get back to the live me.com site again but no joy. Instead, I got redirected to the promo page for the service, over on apple.com web site.

No idea what the cause of the problem was. Here are my thoughts on some challenges that Apple had to handle:

1. Tons of users. Apple's .Mac service has been out for years and they have lots of paying customers. That means a lot of accounts, a lot of emails, a lot of web drives, a lot of emails, a lot of data. Any small or rare problems would be magnified by these numbers.

2. Multiple browsers. Apple went live with support for 3 browsers: Safari 3, IE 7, and Firefox 7. They did not do just one and then another one or two. I know this because I was using Firefox. If the beta test was not sufficiently large or long-lasting maybe something got missed.

3. At least one supported browser, Firefox 3, was pretty fresh from the oven. Firefox 3 just came out last month. It seems to work great - especially on the Mac, which is what I was using. Still, it seems rare to my memory to have one vendor release a new product using a just released version of a product from another vendor. Few months old yes but few weeks old no.

No idea if any of these things were a factor. Just mentioning them to give a feel for what a big job Apple had on its hands to create this service - and how minute risks from these things could have made it harder to get everything right on opening night.

As I write this, I still cannot access the new service which was supposed to be live all day today. I hope it comes up this evening. If it does, I really hope it stays up.

Labels: apple

posted by John Collins @ 4:34 PM