Short Term Pain, Long Term Gain?

Ok, last post for a while on the whole MobileMe/iPhone 3G implementation problems.

Everything has now pretty much settled down.

Apple have managed to:

• Roll out a new version of iTunes - 7.7
• Migrate .Mac to MobileMe (with the exception of a few services still to arrive on the file sharing side)
• Upgrade the majority of original iPhones to V2.0 of the software
• Sold 1,000,000 iphones over the weekend
• Cracked the activation problems (or rather the sheer numbers of activations have decreased significantly)
• Launched the new App store
• Delivered 10,000,000 iPhone applications

Not a bad couple of days work really. Did they really think they could pull it off without any problems, without having some of the infrastructure going into meltdown.

Of course not!

On reflection, my take is that Apple decided to bite the bullet and take the heat for in effect 48 hours, on the understanding that the damage inflicted over those 48 hours would be deflected by several factors:

• The fact that Apple were undertaking this Herculean task gave them a get out clause in a lot of peoples eyes - the sheer balls of Apple to try and pull this off made people a little more forgiving when it all went pear shaped for a bit.
• The fact that there were so many parallel activities going on at once meant that people didn't become too fixated with one particular aspect of the rollout - switching between the various elements to see what was happening.
• By springing so many new new toys on us over the period - new v2.0 software, new Apps, new iPhones (it all got a bit too much at one point) and certainly removed some of the negatives, at least for me.

So what was the alternative?

A prolonged rollout over a couple of weeks or even months as I had previously suggested? A nice safe staggered rollout?

The likelihood is that the system meltdowns would have occurred even if each element was rolled out individually over a longer timeframe. The MobileMe infrastructure has probably no relationship with the iPhone activation infrastructure. The App store probably has no tie up with the MobileMe Infrastructure or the iPhone activation systems.

So by dragging out the rollouts individually, the mac community would only have one failure at a time to dwell on, report the hell out of and join together in a collective moan that Apple were screwing up and the sky was falling. We would have had one perceived disaster after another, each one getting the full treatment and analysis from the mac community. How damaging wold that have been, week after week?

Kudos to Apple for biting the bullet and putting us through a short amount of pain for a long term gain.

Just don't do it too often please Apple.

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