The MobileMess has been picked up by a few media outlets out there. Today David Pogue of the New York Times added his contribution: Apple's MobileMess.

In it he hit on what has been the most frustrating and unbelievable part of this whole thing:

But the real problem is how Apple is responding. For a company that’s so brilliant at marketing, it seems to have absolutely no clue about crisis management.

One of my correspondents put it like this: “I love Apple. My first computer ever was a 128K Macintosh. But the lack of explanation and communication on the MobileMe problem is outrageous. Why not update the status message? Why not give us some indication of what’s going on?”

Companies make mistakes. Tech companies have problems. But when some 20,000+ people are affected - and affected for a week - and when by affected we mean absolutely no email service - the company involved should release *some* sort of information. So far absolutely nothing useful has come out of Apple. The most they have said was insulting at best, a status message (which only showed up several days after the problem began and hasn't been updated since) along the lines of, "We know things aren't working. We're sorry. We're working on it."

Come on Apple. Get us the information, and get this fixed.

Google: Continues to refer to these products as Beta
Apple: Refers to these products as complete and ready for use

Google: All services work well and users experience few if any reliability issues
Apple: Seven days, no email. The other services appear to work fine but users have reported a host of problems.

Google releases a beta and it works flawlessly. Apple releases a finished product only to have to go back and fix a lot of problems.

This is very unusual for Apple. I love my Apple products and have had good experiences with them. This MobileMe stuff, though, has been crazy. As I've mentioned before, once they work out the kinks it will be a great product (except for the name - who came up with that?). They probably should have waited a little longer to release it, however.

Update:
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has a good overview of MobileMe, including a look at all of the problems that have been present with the service. His conclusion? MobileMe is a great idea but too flawed to be recommended.

Now a new Me has joined The Me Club. MobileMe, the badly named, horribly performing package from Apple.

So when Apple released the new iPhone 3g they also released a new service called MobileMe. The service would take the place of their .Mac service and would essentially provide all the same features in shiny new packaging.

Reading about MobileMe I was excited. It finally gives me the holy grail: an easy way to keep mail, calendar, and contacts on my computer, my mobile device (1st gen iPhone), and access it all from the web. I already had a .Mac account so I was looking forward to the new service rolling out.

MobileMe had some pretty rough spots as it was rolled out but that's to be expected with any new service. A few days in and it looked like they had things under control. Until around 11:00 PM CST on Thursday, July 17. At that time email ground to a halt for me and thousands of others.

Apple's support page says 1% of users are affected (a lot of users in the discussion site think the number is probably much higher but I'll give Apple the benefit of the doubt.). That may not sound like a lot until you consider that .Mac/MobileMe has around 2 million subscribers (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/technology/personaltech/17pogue.html?scp=1&sq=mobileme&st=cse) which means some 20,000 people have been without email.

For.Four.Days. Browse the discussion site and you will find a lot of upset people. Stories of people who use their .Mac mail for business contacts and have lost a lot of work as a result. One guy that was waiting for papers he was to print and fax back to sell his house. A mom waiting for important email from her daughter.

I had just switched to using the .Mac account as my primary email so I haven't been too badly affected but I had already used the account to send some important messages and have had the joy of having to go back and re-email the people, asking them to please email me again at a reliable (gmail hosted) email.

The thing that makes all of this so aggravating is Apple has released no information. The MobileMe support page tells me what I already know - 1% of users are without email. I talked with someone on chat support and they have no info either, they just say to watch the support page. I can understand technical trouble. I cannot understand a company that will not tell 20,000 customers why they cannot access their email.

Here's a suspicion. Probably not true, but as I say, I'm ranting. I'll be cynical for a moment. Apple has an investor meeting planned for this afternoon. It is possible they don't want to release information about the problem until the meeting is over rather than let investors get wind of how serious the problem might be. They had so many bumps with the MobileMe rollout more bad news would only hurt them.

On a slightly amusing note, MobileMe chat support is being overwhelmed. Apple's response has been to temporarily disable chat support so new people cannot enter the queue. Instead of being able to chat here is what they see: "Due to the overwhelming interest in MobileMe, all chat support agents are currently busy. Please try again later." Overwhelming interest? Talk about putting a positive spin on things. More like, due to overwhelming outrage...

Come on Apple, give us some information! I know I will forgive you guys for this huge blunder, MobileMe appeals to me too much. But I know lots of other people will not be so forgiving.