After the huge iPhone 3G provisioning debacle, the baffling MobileMe-upgrade morass, and now, yet another Apple e-mail outage, you have to ask yourself if Apple is really ready to deliver online software services. It's one thing if the iTunes store is down, but if e-mail or other MobileMe services are inaccessible for any length of time, users are going to scream, and they do just that on the Apple forums.
Let's face it. Running online software-as-a-service is a much different business proposition than being a software creator or consumer-products hardware company. And Apple is not the first to face this dilemma. Research In Motion gets a black eye and tons of negative mainstream-press coverage every time there's a BlackBerry e-mail service outage. Hundreds of thousands of users can be impacted, showing us how much we rely on online e-mail services to conduct our daily businesses.
On the one hand, I admire Apple for braving the world of online services. Apple continually takes on the role of product innovator, blazing new trails with the iPod and the iPhone. But users who pay $99 a year for e-mail and productivity software services they could get from other sources (like Google) for free, won't be tolerant of service outages for very long. I know for myself, if a productivity software tool or service breaks down more than about twice, I'm moving on to their competitors,looking for an alternate solution.
Online services, like SaaS, cloud services, and Software+Services, bring new technical challenges, such as multi-tenancy, scalability and delivering services with high availability utilizing failover and redundancy. But downtime and service outages "happen," and can be caused by any number of factors, technologies and services providers involved in delivering online services. Microsoft's just now entering the fray itself with Office Workspace, Live SkyDrive, Live Mesh, hosted Microsoft Online Services and future cloud offerings from Microsoft's Software+Services initiatives.
Most of those Microsoft online services are still "beta," offered for free to users. Hosted Exchange and SharePoint will be one of the first to go "live" in October as a production, paid-for service. Can you imagine Microsoft Online Services (hosted Exchange and SharePoint) users will be any more tolerant of outages than Apple's MobileMe users? MobileMe users are half-blinded by their religious-like faith in Steve Jobs and anything sporting the Apple brand. But stop and think about how bad it is when Exchange is down inside your own business. There will be a bloodbath in the media every time Microsoft suffers some customer-impacting Exchange or SharePoint outage, no matter how small.
Maybe the question we should be asking is, Is Microsoft SaaS competent? Or, Has Microsoft learned from Apple's failures?
Like this? Here are some of Mitchell's recent posts.
- Is Apple SaaS Competent? Is Microsoft?
- Microsoft Throwing Its Weight Around With Security
- Juniper UAC+NAP Only Part Of Microsoft's Story
- Development Costs In The Cloud
- Meet Up At Black Hat
- Podcast: SOA and Web Services, But BizTalk?
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Mitchell Ashley is principal consultant at Converging Network LLC where he provides product, technology and social media consulting to emerging technology companies. A successful CTO and product innovator, Mitchell has created many successful, award winning products in the networking, security, convergence, Internet and IT industries. In addition to blogging for NetworkWorld, Mitchell regularly blogs at TheConvergingNetwork and co-hosts the widely popular StillSecure After All These Years podcast.
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The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Just my two cents..
Actually - the problem as I see is not Apple, MS or any other vendor but the user. Yes, the cliches cause problems to vendors AND they should do a better job than what has happened but - time for risk assessment for users. And over time the services will get better or die.
The problems with SaaS or S+S are nothing new but just forgotten for a long time or maybe just not realized that any distributed computing needs reliability, capacity, security and performance. And, IMHO, also very good accounting and auditing. I just enhanced an old reporting system which can have query processes running in XXX number of systems round the globe to modern platforms, from early 80's - really!, - old stuff. And of course most government services are just that - you run them as a service for whatever reason and in whatever system they happen to be.
Mainly it comes back to the capacity management which seems to have deteriorated to running reports and nice pictures. If you don't have the capacity to do decent architecture, security, performance, accounting, etc - forget services. Think it this way - remote backups and restores, are they services? Using SWIFT transaction services, looks a lot like a service to me? Even library queries, executed over modem connections before Internet times - a service? You pay for those, I think? Can you afford it, does it stay up enough, do you have good SLAs, is it secure, etc - or maybe it is better to create your own "service"? A user decision.
I see the problem as a hype and marketing instead of a technical problem. If you trust a vendor tool or toy can solve your problems instead of strategy, planning and design - good luck!
at least for the smaller
at least for the smaller business segment, companies who have operated in this segment for years are better - salesforce, hyperoffice.
it takes a lot more than the biggies thought. a competence which comes with experience. the cracks in mobileme are already beggining to show with recurrent problems.
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