Britney Spears, Steve Jobs, Mobile Me, and WOW

Britney Spears

By 2003, Britney Spears was the first artist in the history of Nielsen SoundScan to have four consecutive albums debut at number one, and she was one of the hottest celebrities in the world.

In 2004, Spears announced a career break in order to start a family. Because of this break and a variety of personal problems, her career was all but dead by 2006, and she was reduced from “super star” status to fodder for late night comics and tabloid magazines.

Americans love to give second chances. (We also love to destroy our heroes first, but that is a subject for another blog post.) So when the announcement was made that Spears would perform “Gimme More” at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, the anticipation was huge. This was to be her “come back” appearance when all was forgiven. She was expected to reclaim her place as pop culture royalty and the good graces of her adoring fans.

Unfortunately, her performance was universally panned, and she dug deeper into “has been” status.

Apple Did The Same Thing

Apple introduced iTools on January 5, 2000. It was available free of charge and included a .mac e-mail address. I subscribed on Apr 8, 2000. Apple rebranded this service as .Mac on July 17, 2002, threw in a few more features, and started charging for it.

I have been a .Mac evangelist since it was launched. The concept is cool: it can sync your contact, calendar, bookmarks, and other information across all of your computers. The service also comes with iDisk, an online disk storage service and backup.

Although the concept is great, .Mac has been universally dubbed a flop. The service is very, very buggy, and support is almost non-existant. Many refer to the annual service fee as “the Mac tax,” which is the money you pay to Apple just have some degree of functionality for something that is really not good enough to buy separately.

Enter Mobile Me

Apple had a chance to change this perception with release of Mobile Me, the latest incarnation of .Mac. Everybody, including me, was ready to forget the past and embrace the WOW of MobileMe, just like we were ready to give Britney another chance.

Our hope was that Apple would finally get it right. Apple hoped that the users would forget the past if they did.  But, unfortunately our hope didn’t come true and Apple didn’t get it right.

Specifically:

• The launch of MobileMe was delayed 36 to 48 hours. To this day, several components (such as iCards) aren’t functioning.
• The highlight of MobileMe “push e-mail,” or “exchange for the rest of us,” has been downgraded to “automatic sync.” Even now, this feature isn’t working as they said it would.
• MobileMe is as buggy as previous versions. Some of the features work—some of the time.
• The support for MobileMe is just as bad as before. Only e-mail-based support is available. It takes several days to receive a reply, and the answer one receives is often as perplexing as being told “yellow” when asking for the time.

Dropping The Ball

Steve Jobs indicated that MobileMe was the biggest release of his career, along with the debut of iPhone 2.0. I don’t know what went wrong. But something did go terribly awry. Apple, like Britney, flubbed the new release.

It could have been a big comeback, but it wasn’t. It was as bad as before, in spite of the WOW preceding its release.