Jobs: MobileMe Launched Too Soon

In what amounts to a mea culpa, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admits the launch of its MobileMe service came too quickly, and wasn't up to Apple's standards.

In an internal message sent to employees, Apple CEO Steve Jobs discussed Apple’s recently-launched—and problem-plagued—MobileMe service, and admitted the company launched the service too soon, with the result that MobileMe didn’t meet Apple’s high standards.

“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software, and the App Store,” Jobs wrote. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”

MobileMe has been plagued with problems since it’s teetering launch, first admitting the rollout went less than smoothly and offering subscribers a free month of credit, only to see the service lose email, drop synchronizations, and completely fail for some users. Apple then dropped “push” from its description of its service—initially billed as “Exchange for the rest of us”—and was forced to, in a very un-Apple-like fashion—post a page with system status updates so users would know what was going on.

Apple is also reorganizing the MobileMe team, putting the entire group under the purview of Eddy Cue, who will now head up all of Apple’s Internet services, including iTunes, the App Store, and MobileMe. Jobs admitted MobileMe needed more development and testing effort, and said he believes MobileMe should have been rolled out one component at a time, rather than as a single all-encompassing service.

“The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,” Jobs says. “And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.”