Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking the MobileMe mix-up seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he’s given the job of heading the division to a new executive.
Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue — the leader of Apple’s Internet services, including iTunes — will replace Rob Schoeben as MobileMe’s captain. Apple was not immediately available for comment on Schoeben’s fate.
MobileMe is a service that delivers push e-mail, push contacts and push calendars into the “cloud” of native applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, Macs and PCs. MobileMe saw major outages and even lost customer e-mails, leaving many consumers angry. Now, the wrath of Jobs has come down on MobileMe’s leader.
According to Ars Technica, Jobs sent an e-mail to employees admitting mistakes in the planning and launching of the MobileMe service. Jobs reportedly told employees the service was “not up to Apple’s standards” and acknowledged a mistake in introducing it in combination with the iPhone 3G.
Apple’s Admitted Mistake
“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” Jobs said in the message. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”
A renamed version of the .Mac online service, MobileMe was supposed to help Apple compete with the BlackBerry. But problems were evident from the beginning, as a transition from .Mac to MobileMe that should have taken hours took nearly all day. Customers also complained about slow synchronization.
Next, Apple encountered a mail outage affecting one percent of MobileMe members. On July 18, a serious problem with one of Apple’s mail servers blocked those members’ access to their MobileMe mail accounts.
Apple reports that it has since added server capacity and tuned its software to scale better. The team has also fixed more than 70…