As a engineer who works in the IT field I’d like to tell Apple I would love to be the guy that puts their online services division back in order. I for one hate to say someone needs to lose their job, but it’s painfully obvious someone has dropped the ball here.
Not only have they failed, they did in the most spectacular fashion possible. Several times.
First is the me.com mess. If you’re going to make a wide ranging change to a system, you do not launch it a few days before the flagship product that uses it.
Second Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have figured out that global product launches can be a pain. In their cases it’s a few million products. Some numbers have put the launch at around 5 to 6 million phones. Do your engineers know what stress testing is?
iTunes Store is a mess. Some of it is clearly partitioned since I have not seen a negative impact for a few services. iPod software purchases should of been enabled days ago which would of given the store a run for it’s money. Any problems would have been identified and fixed prior to the more stressful iPhone launch.
PR or lack of any meaningful communication is just a slap in the face to customers. AT&T blames Apple for the problem, Apple is silent. I’ll be fair in saying that AT&T is not a leader in building redundant capacity into their systems so it could entirely be their fault this has happened. However, the meltdown of the iTunes store shows me that it’s most likely an Apple problem. Acting like a kid who keeps his mouth shut in order to avoid getting into trouble is not very mature for a company or a kid. Own up to your problems is the first step to regaining consumer trust.