this was a long time ago, mobile me is working fine nowadays, and its going to get supersized pronto!
Yes, he does take the heat. However, there are better ways of going about it... you don't *degrade* your employees. You'll loose them.
So it's obviously not the peoples fault who worked on it. The entire concept is bad and blaming the people who try to get it running is unfair. He is the one to blame because he is in charge and set it up like crap.
But that's typical managerial behavior. Start some crappy flawed concept and blame the people who try to make it work. [sorry for the rant]
i'm not questioning your work background or experience, but i do question that you can speak for success in enterprise. especially when you write:
"I've worked for long enough to know what you do and don't do to your employees. Sure, you don't wrap them up in cotton wool.... of course not.. but you don't go for the other extreme as well. You find out what went wrong and handle it *maturely* without lashing out. A *good* company will *learn* from its mistakes.."
By implication:apple is not a "good" company (you'd have an argument from Forbes, Fortune Most Admired Company (4 years in a row), Harvard Business and on and on for management, design, marketing, distribution (google for more).
I have worked in a similar environment and learned more about reaching my goals, pushing myself and my self expectations than I ever learned before. It's not the appropriate culture for everyone, but judging whether a company is "maturely managed" "good" or doesn't "learn from it's mistakes" just by time passing, seems ill informed. It's so easy to criticize things that don't the way other people think they should look/act/think.
You are taking a meeting held during in the heat of the one of the biggest, most embarrassing public screwups in the history of the company and extrapolating that into a day-to-day working culture.
It's hard to seriously criticize a guy's management style when he's on the greatest 15-year run in the history of modern American business.
It's even worse than that. That was 3 years ago and it's STILL a failure. Please tell me why someone should pay $99 for MobileMe when Google gives it to you all for free, PLUS, you don't actually have to see their ads if you use your own clients!
Steve should chill a bit. Yelling at the MobileMe team is highly unprofessional.
The service was crap from the beginning and is still crap now. I've been a .mac customer for years and since the MobileMe launch the service has gotten just worse and worse. Emails come with minutes or hours delay, syncing is still like playing the lottery, iDisk is slow as molasses.
So it's obviously not the peoples fault who worked on it. The entire concept is bad and blaming the people who try to get it running is unfair. He is the one to blame because he is in charge and set it up like crap.
But that's typical managerial behavior. Start some crappy flawed concept and blame the people who try to make it work. [sorry for the rant]
I personally liked .mac
It was a cool name.
Never should've changed it.
If rumours are true - a CEO - who sacks people in elevators needs better people skills. There's nothing to stop a CEO building a great company while having crap people skills. Sure, SJ has good vision, but like everyone he has his weak points - he's not perfect. SJ is not exempt from criticism... thats pure arrogance.
As a paying customer from the start of MobileMe, I find this incredibly amusing and wish I could've been in the room when this smack down was being hand delivered hot and fresh.
If the employees can't take it then they can quit on the spot and find another job. Simple as that.
It's even worse than that. That was 3 years ago and it's STILL a failure. Please tell me why someone should pay $99 for MobileMe when Google gives it to you all for free, PLUS, you don't actually have to see their ads if you use your own clients!
I bet everyone who has a problem with what he said would see it differently if he didn't swear. There's nothing else in the anecdote to indicate that he was yelling. Also, the launch of MobileMe was an embarrassment, why wouldn't he call them out on it? Sometimes you have to light fires under asses.
So Jobs admits MobileMe is crap, and then he's mad at Mossberg for telling the truth about it? What?