Mossberg Pans MobileMe: Did Apple Screw Up?

One of my pet peeves is poor-quality products. Actually, it's way more than a pet peeve. Products with obvious flaws have been known to cause bad language here at Farpoint Group, and very bad language at that. I can't imagine why anyone would ship a product that doesn't work, or isn't at least functional to the point of meeting its published specs. Sure, wireless introduces a statistical quality to any radio-based product or service, but there's no excuse for outright bugs. Windows has just driven me right up the wall over the years because the quality of the code is so poor. I just can't deal with Microsoft anymore; I've given up. So - problems like this can get very serious indeed.

Walt Mossberg, the highly visible and very influential individual who writes the Personal Technology column for the Wall Street Journal, just gave Apple's shiny new MobileMe service (the successor to .Mac) the equivalent of a "Not Acceptable" rating from Consumer Reports. Mossberg cited numerous performance, reliability, clunkiness, and other problems that often appear in beta software but shouldn't be present in released code. He noted that Apple has acknowledged many of the problems that he cited and he reports that they are working on fixes. But, as a potential iPhone customer, I'm given pause by this report. Apple is known for elegance, not Microsoft-style screw-ups.

Apple's products are far from perfect, but the company rarely makes mistakes like this. Quality problems, apart from just being bad PR, open the door to competition. Now, Apple has little to worry about at the moment. Many people buy iPhones just because they come from Apple. And don't get me wrong - the iPhone is clearly a very innovative device and one which is already spawning a good-sized array of would-be competitors - surely the best acknowledgement that Apple is doing something right. But without quality backing up style, competitors have a much easier time in gaining a competitive foothold.

There's no doubt that Windows 95 took market share from Apple, thanks to lower prices and a greater variety of products to choose from, and no doubt that Vista has given some of that back. Excellence - building products that respect the customer - requires more effort and expense, but it's the only path to success today. I like Apple's focus on value-added services - reminiscent, to be fair, of the BlackBerry strategy. The competitive landscape will increasingly be based on software and services, not flashy phones, which all handset vendors will have. And the software competitors are out there - BlackBerry, Motorola's Good, maybe even Microsoft, and potentially many others. Apple will, I think, get this right, and they've got a little breathing room to do so. But a product review like this in a year or two could be fatal.