Apple may have released its long awaited iPhone 2.0 yesterday around the world, but the initial reports are far from encouraging. Yes, they went like hotcakes, but is anyone connected, yet? I dropped into my local O2 store this morning and and they were all sold out. Didn't even have any samples though they dig one up just to show me. Nice looking, of course, and a slight improvement on No. 1 from the design and coolness factor.
Apparently all the set-up issues related back to software problems and Apple's infrastructure (or lack of it). The same was true with the new MobileMe service, which is still balky today. Contacts not connecting to e-mail. Calendar sync problems. Slow. Crashy behaviour. Photos don't upload altogether satisfactorily or at all.
All in all, a pretty sorry showing for Apple and another reason to question Apple's ability to scale on a truly massive scale when it comes to linking everything together. For all its faults, you have to give Microsoft credit for getting this bit down. And Google and Yahoo! for that matter. They all know how to roll out large online SW deployments and have them work.
IMO, the big mistake Apple made was letting their arrogance get in the way of common sense. Why did they wait until the day before launch to roll out MobileMe? They should have had it up at least a week before so they could work out the inevitable bugs with existing .Mac users. As it was, they not only pissed off existing customers, but their new customers. What a stroke of marketing genius.
Apple usually does things right and has a nice winning streak. It just could be that all this success and press adoration is going to their heads. At Apple where hardware and design are king, someone needs to wake up the boys on the SW side.
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