It's not You, it's MobileMe

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I understand that large scale technology projects can go awry, however, the problems with the .Mac to MobileMe transition existed before the conversion even started.

I received precisely two emails from Apple regarding the change from .Mac to MobileMe. Neither of those messages mentioned anything about the website being inaccessible. Users who checked the fine print on Apple's support site would have learned that there was an impending outage from 6pm to 12am PT. If they had thought to keep checking that page regularly, they would have learned that the schedule changed at the last minute to reflect a two hour delay. There certainly wasn't any hint that the outage would last over 17 hours.

To make matters worse, there has been a complete lack of communication with your customers during this extended downtime. Only a vague promise that, "the MobileMe web apps will be available as soon as possible." And that promise is in microscopic text on a support page that users need to search for. If someone just visited the www.mac.com site, they see a multilingual message stating that the service is unavailable due to scheduled maintenance. At the very least, that page should include a link to the support page. Even better would be a detailed explanation of the problems along with an apology for the shameless lack of anything even remotely resembling decent customer service.

I've been a subscriber for over 8 years when this was called iTools and I have endured the all-to-frequent outages during that time, but this is absolutely unacceptable and I can't think of any reason why I should renew my subscription when it comes up this October.

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Chat with mobileme support represntative....
me: Thanks. I'm concerned. Except for email via a desktop client, I cannot use any me.com services
me: I can't log into the web interface at all.

him: Our engineers are currently performing maintenance on .Mac while they complete the transfer of service over to MobileMe. MobileMe will not actually completely live until tomorrow.
him: They were supposed to have the maintenance completed this morning, but they had to extend it. They have not given us an estimated time for completion. All they tell us is that it will be up and running ASAP.
him: I know it's frustrating, and I am sorry for any problems this is causing for you.

me: Thanks. I noticed the me.com status page indicates are services are ok and "green". The dotMac status page indicates only a couple services down. I think communication is the most bedviling issue right now.

him: I understand that. As I said, they aren't exactly keeping us in the loop on what the hold up is.
him: Which makes hard for us for us to keep you and other customers informed.

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MobileMe Status Update
The MobileMe transition is underway but is taking longer than expected. Please refer to the official System Status to the right for current information on the availability of MobileMe services. We apologize for any inconvenience.

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With the exception of the MobileMe web apps, all of the following services are now available: Mail, iDisk, Sync, iChat, Back to My Mac, and all published pages including Galleries and iWeb sites. The MobileMe web apps will be available as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you need to send and receive mail, please use the desktop email application on your Mac, PC, iPhone or iPod touch.
We apologize for any inconvenience.

log_user 0
spawn telnet www.me.com 80
expect "Escape character is \'\^\]\'."
send "GET / HTTP/1.1\r"
send "Host: www.me.com\r"
send "Connection: close\r"
send "\r"
expect {
	"Location: http://www.apple.com/mobileme" {send_user "Not yet.\n"}
	eof {send_user "It's up!\n"}
	}