Daring Fireball Linked List: Tris:

Noah Witherspoon is pulling his free Tetris clone Tris from the App Store under pressure from The Tetris Company, who own the Tetris copyright. The official iPhone Tetris from EA costs $10 and takes 30 seconds to launch.

And the message SHOULD be, but won’t be, “don’t write someone else’s game, write YOUR game” — because if they don’t want you to publish it, you don’t have a whole lot of options.

And the universe is full of “tetris-inspired” games that aren’t having this problem. thinking through this problem ahead of time can save yourself amazing amounts of pain later, no?

More Contrition, Less Communication From Apple – Faster Forward:

I do find myself more confident that Apple will fix what ails MobileMe. That optimism doesn’t come anything the company has said, but from blog posts by Apple alumnus and astute Silicon Valley observer Chuq von Rospach, who left the company in 2006 after 17 years (!) there

Wanna make my day and bring a smile to my face? Wanna see me plug you in my blog?

Okay, seriously. Wanna make my day and bring a smile to my face? (nobody should see being plugged in my blog as high on their “must be done this week” list)

Simply write stuff like this.

But as I’ve said many times about this kind of stuff, if you hang around long enough, people start declaring you an expert simply because you’ve been hanging around for a long time.

I certainly try to avoid taking myself too seriously around this place. Consider this my reminder to all of you to do the same.

astute. I’ve been called many things over the years, but I think that’s a new one. it’s one I don’t need to hide from the family, either!

Update: got the following email overnight.

Your blog entry is wrong, the VP is not Rob Schoeben. The ex-microsoft person who ran MobileMe was John Martin.

No reason to make Rob look bad publicly. Please correct, for Rob’s sake.

Re-update: just got another confirmation of the above, so I’ve changed the text below. Apologies to Rob Schoeben for tossing the fickle finger of YOU at him (but to be honest, Martin seems to be flying pretty much entirely under the online radar, which isn’t easy to do these days…). Some research on the initial contact I had makes me comfortable saying it was an Apple person of some sort, although I didn’t know him. My second contact isn’t Apple, but I know I can trust, so that seems to settle this.

Schoeben is definitely still there. Definitely not fired.

Within Apple, the blame for MobileMe’s launch is widely, if not universally, seen as lying on John Martin’s shoulders. Martin is still listed in the company directory, but apparently no longer reporting to anyone.

———————

Both should be construed as completely unsubstantiated rumors (which, unlike the rumor sites, I’m more than happy to point out are unsubstantiated….):

First, I heard via one of those “friend of a friend” connections that Rob Schoeben John Martin was (to use their words” escorted off the Apple campus friday. Schoeben Martin was the guy ultimately in charge of MobileMe, but was also VP of Applications Marketing (iLife, iWork, pro apps). He’s an ex-Microsoft exec brought in a few years ago. He them, according to this person, “brought in a bunch of his microsoft friends”. If it’s not obvious, that was not stated as a compliment.

Now, the phrasing of how this was phrased caught my ear. The implication (at least to me) was that this wasn’t a “decided to spend more time with his family” parting of the ways, and perhaps even a surprise to Schoeben Martin. Whether he was literally walked to the parking lot iwth a box of his stuff in full view of the cheering crowds of Apple employees, I don’t know – but that’s the image I get of this, based on how it was told to me. And for better or worse, I can see Steve Jobs doing something like that.

Or perhaps it was all scheduled and someone’s waxing dramatic in my direction. Wouldn’t be the first time. But it sounds like Steve has a (virtual) head on a (virtual) pike outside of IL1 for the MobileMe fiasco. Whether or not they stoned the poor sap (virtually) on the way to the gallows is sort of irrelevant, but I’m amused by the imagery.

I feel bad for him, too. Don’t know him, never worked for him, but it couldn’t have been fun recently, but ultimately, it was his ship, and it ran aground in the harbor, and captains never maintain their command when that happens; and most of the time, they’re lucky to stay in the service as a paper shuffler.

It’ll be interesting to see if I get confirmation, or if Apple actually makes a public statement on this. Or even if it’s true.

Second interesting tidbit: there’s been a lot of talk about the iPhone 3G disconnects recently, and exactly what the problem is and who’s to blame. AT&T has said “not me”, Apple hasn’t said much of anything, and I’ve seen speculation running all over the place, up to and including “millions of units need to be recalled”.

Well, I was having lunch with an ex-fruity type the other day, and we got talking about this stuff, and they know someone who knows someone who.. (okay, have I obfuscated this well enough? We’re at “my sister’s barber is Elvis’ 2nd cousin’s housekeeper’s boyfriend…).

What I was told was that 90% of the disconnects are initiated inside the phone, which would exonerate AT&T. Most of the disconnects are being generated by crashes in the driver code for the 3G chip, which comes from the chip vendor, not something Apple written and outside of Apple’s direct control. Complicating this — even though Apple is handing over “here is the bug, here is the fix, update the driver”, the turnaround from the vendor on driver updates is on the order of 2-3 months. Said, um, lack of urgency not exactly making people inside the projects happy.

Apple had a very good relationship with the company that worked on the innards of the iPod; for the G3 iPhone, it sounds like it’s not working quite so swimmingly. What makes me think there’s some validity to this is Apple’s recent purchase of the chip design house — there’s no real reason to do this unless you’re looking to bring design of these kinds ofchips in where you can control them, and you only do that if (a) it’ll save you lots of money, or (b) you’ve decided you can’t afford to let these key components out of your control. If the driver problem (and lack of vendor urgency) is true, that’d explain Apple’s interest in bringing this inhouse, because it’s not a problem they can directly control, yet they take the hit for the problems. And the phrase used to describe the quality of the drivers is “absolute travesty”

The best aspect of this rumor (if true) is that the hardware is fine; once they can get the drivers fixed (or replaced), the units should be fine. Thinking “recall” is unecessary and overkill, the real question seems to be how quickly Apple can beat the fixes out of the vendor.

Or maybe I’m being lied to again. Only time will tell…

And strangely enough, these rumors found me. I wasn’t even asking…

Chuqui 3.0: Firefighters respond to fire at Apple’s Cupertino campus:

Appleinsider called the building “one of the most famous buildings on the Apple Campus, as it is known to house a number of hardware-based research and development projects that are underway at the company”, which puts their journalistic ability in perspective (again), given it’s not on campus, and it hasn’t housed any significant hardware R&D since the 68000 processor teams moved out.

I got an email asking me why I was picking on AppleInsider, suggesting I was being harsh.

guilty as charged. Why? because I can.

There is, however a deeper aspect. Sites like Appleinsider play the “We iz Journalists. We’z Kul!” game, but there’s often very little substance and depth, which ultimately turns it into fanboy crap. And that’s YOUR fault, loyal readers, because you give them credits way beyond their abilities. When they get it right, everyone falls over twitching and drooling over having found out some inconsequential detail earlier than Apple wanted you to — but they get a lot of stuff wrong, too, and everyone forgets that stuff. Of course the site’s not going to remind you, so the end result is people think these sites are a lot more insightful and accurate and “rumortastic” than they really are.

I’ll give you a little hint here: some of us, back when I was inside the fruity compound, occasionally held contests to see who could get the weirdest, most funky and outrageous, rumors posted to one of the major rumor sites. The easiest way seems to be to find one of the marginal fanboy sites and convince THEM to publish it, and then watch it ripple across all of the boards and mutate as other boards create their own scoops based only on reading other boards… (attribution optional, of course).

And yes, some of those photoshopped prototypes and other fun and games came from Apple people — and a few beers. Remember that next time one of these fanboy sites touts some fascinating new “leak”. After a few beers, lots of things tend to leak, ya know? (Asteroid, FWIW, wasn’t one of those leaks. The fanboy sites that think it was a set up by Apple to get them have way too high a view of themselves in the food chain. Asteroid was — well, that’s a story for a bar and a beer, not a blog…. Sorry)

FWIW, I think some of the rumor sites do a decent job. Yes, they get stuff right. Yes, they sometimes piss off Apple big time. Yes, they sometimes screw the royal pooch, too. And they also encourage people to violate their NDAs and other agreements, so they’re also a key reason why developers (and others) have such tough times getting information out of Apple, so there are negatives to all of this, too.

Oh, and to the developers who feed information to these sites… A few years back, my boss and I came up with a way to track down exactly who’s doing the leaking. it’s very simple to implement, it isn’t hard to do, would be invisible to the developers so they’d have no reason to be careful or realize Apple was tracking them, and it’d be accurate, and the leakers wouldn’t know it was happening until the hammer fell. At the time, though, the ThinkSecret case was still ongoing so it wasn’t implemented. But it could be, some day, if Apple decides it wants to.

So realize not that you’re being too smart for Apple, but that Apple’s decided it’s not worth the hassle and PR to catch you. And hope that doesn’t change…

Just a touchpad and a screen: A grand unified theory of Apple’s next big move » VentureBeat:

Ever since Apple’s chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, referred to a “future product transition” during the company’s most recent earnings call, the tech news world has been abuzz.

For what it’s worth, I think the blogs and fanboys are blowing this way out of proportion with what the reality is going to be — and then (as usual) will blame Apple for it not being as absolutely gosh-wow as they dreamed it might be.

I’m still convinced reality is more evolutionary than revolutionary. First, Steve generally schedules his revolutions in January and at WWDC when he can take the stage and really give the hype machine a push. Moving into the holiday season, it’s more about focus on how to sell zillions of things for christmas, and things requiring lots of explanation and long-selling times simply don’t fit.

What Oppenheimer said fits new price/performance models just as easily as it does a tablet PC — and bluntly, you’ll sell many zillions more of things if you tweak the margins down a couple of points than if you introduce some really nifty gosh-wow piece of the future that people won’t really understand why they will want one for three months when the advertising and marketing materials and early adopters explain why this is gosh-wow.

So you’re a lot more likely to see revamps of existing products at new, lower price/performance points with reduced margins than you are things that’ll make the fanboys drool and stand in line for a week to be first to get one. And, of course, when that happens, the fanboys (and the analysts that depend on apple hype to actually see their name sin newspapers twice a year) will blame Apple for not coming through with something it hasn’t actually been promising… Again.

Just sayin….

How Apple Should Handle the App Store Blacklist:

I’ve been trying to decide if I wanted to wade in here, lest people thnk this blog’s turning into “all apple, all the time”. but what the heck, why not?

To a good degree, I agree completely with this piece, with a couple of minor caveats.

The question of how Apple should use the App Store blacklist has been bandied about lately and so far, no one really has the answer. Should Apple act unilaterally and remove apps without any warning? Should it ask for user input? The questions are numerous and the answers are in short supply. I think it needs to have a full-fledged plan that’s made available to the public so developers and users alike will know what to expect.

So what exactly should Apple be doing? It should first start out with a real policy. How can it summarily remove applications from the App store without warning the developer or user? It doesn’t make any sense.

Included in that policy, it should develop an understanding between both the user and Apple that makes both entities work together to achieve the lofty goal of making it a better service for all parties involved.

First and foremost, Apple needs to install a “report” button that lets the users alert the company to ridiculous applications like “I am Rich” and helps them sift through the good and the bad.

By doing that, it also helps create a rapport between Apple and users, who have been kept in the dark so far about what’s really going on when it removes applications like NetShare, Box Office, and others. Let’s face it – users are downloading these applications and they have every right in the world to know what’s going on with them. I don’t think that’s asking too much.

Secondly, Apple needs to set parameters for how apps should be priced. I have no problem with developers assigning prices to their work, but $1,000 for an iPhone application that gives you a mantra isn’t worth $1, let alone $1,000.

99% of the current complaints about what’s going on with the store are solved with a simple thing: communication. Whatever the policy for the App store is, it’s a secret. When something is removed from the store, the reason is a secret. what is cause for acceptance and rejection is basically a secret. “Magic happens” and you either appear or disappear from the store.

All that engenders frustration, and the developers and users are right. that has to stop. I don’t think Apple is “being evil” here as much as scrambling with serious overload, but honestly, they’re trying to work TOO fast and creating problems in their wake by what corners they’re cutting.

So my suggestions are:

1) get in touch wtih the developers; there’s an approval policy internally, somewhere. release it. explain it. At least let them know where the lines in the sand are.

2) remember the mobileMe blog? the one that magically went quiet again as soon as the crisis was over? (gee, funny that. nice conversation). How about an App store blog, so when something is removed from the store, users are told about it. AND WHY. Especially if it’s because of some kind of security or data leakage problem, which users deserve to know.

3) create and publish an appeal process for developers. there has to be somewhere for them to get a decision reviewed. right now, that’s a black hole.

do 1 and 3, and life gets MUCH better for Apple, really fast. Do 2 and you get even closer to the ideal state (to quote Bill Cosby: “Parents don’t want justice, they want quiet”. and what we want here, for apple, is quiet; justice would be nice, too)

as to reporting buttons? Not a huge fan, I don’t think they work well in real life, and they’re easy things to create and ignore and let someone think they’re being heard when in reality they’re being ignored.

Adn having Apple tell a company what to charge for their app? Nope. let th free market play out here. you trust users (with the button) to tell Apple about bad apps, but don’t trust those same users to tell developers they mispriced their stupid product? hey, if the users are smart enough for one, they’re smart enough for both. Let the users vote with their wallets.

my view on Apple managing the app store: you want Apple taking care of key issues, and that includes things like interface integrity, security bugs, data leakages and stuff that could really bork over a phone or it’s owner. but beyond that, the fewer things Apple is involved in, the better. I’d rather see 1000 stupid apps in the store die of neglect than one app not make it into the store because Apple thought it’d be stupid but really didn’t understand what it was all about….

Chuqui 3.0: MobileMe Problems Show Apple Needs an Infrastructure Lesson:

That this release was botched isn’t about Apple not having a clue, but about the MobileMe people either blowing it (I can think of any number of scenarios — scaling it hard). The ultimate failure seemed to be more capacity planning mistakes than anything else, if I’m guessing right. but the ultimate failure was not being willing to tell Steve “we aren’t ready” and taking that heat. They thought they could release and make it work, and guessed very wrong (or thought they were in good shape, which is worse).

I want to thank everyone who’s read, linked, emailed or commented on my thoughts on MobileMe the last few days. it’s been really interesting to see the reaction and hear the feedback. There’s a great and fascinating comment thread on the posting that I encourage everyone to read.

I have to admit that the first reaction when I realized that this thing was going to get huge readership was “man, am I going to get in trouble again?” — then I remembered I didn’t work at Apple any more. But old habits die hard, it seems.

The feedback from “the inside” was heartening. thanks, all. And to those of you emailing me from your apple accounts, what were you thinking? (grin). I’ll simply say that the reaction from that quarter indicates to me I was fairly close to the mark, and leave it at that.

And now, to make a few comments on the comments…

I think the credit card transaction delay example is a bad one, as it’s by design. Apple aims to gather up multiple purchases for a single credit card transaction to reduce fees.

There are a couple of reasons for this; three, actually — one, pulling together a bunch of small transactions into one larger one limits the card charges to Apple, so they pay less to the cards to handle charges; second, SAP is, pure and simple, not a real time processing system, so you HAVE to batch stuff into it, you can no scale SAP to handle what iTunes does in real time; third: this allows Apple to moderate the flow of transactions during peak times and spread the load out, it’s a form of scaling that lets you use the quieter times to avoid having to throw ever more hardware at a problem just for the peak loads.

The second reason (SAP is not a real time system) is one not well appreciated. Apple’s IT crews have some some unbelievable work around SAP, and people don’t appreciate just how critical this is to the company’s success. This is one part of it — SAP simply isn’t capable of doing what Apple needs it to do, and Apple’s geeks have found ways to beat it into submission. Mac OS X and Aperture and iLife get the coverage in the press, but down in the trenches are a bunch of people working their butts off doing stuff that’d make most CIOs drool.

By the way, every time I see someone say “Apple doesn’t do Enterprise” or “Apple doesn’t get the Enterprise”, I have to laugh. If you’re a CIO or an IT/Datacenter wonk, you would find a briefing by Apple on Enterprise stuff eye opening. Niall O’connor and his band of gleeful leprechauns are doing stuff (and doing it on Xserves to a huge degree) that’ll fry your brain. I spent my last decade at Apple in IT, and got to see (and work with, and sometimes fight with) those folks a lot, and they’ve really put together a top notch crew and a top flight operation. Apple is the largest, global, single-instance SAP environment in existence, and the entire company is driven by that beast and the tools they’ve built. amazing stuff.

I find it curious that people would hold up the iTunes Store as a good example of an Apple service done well. The release of iPhone OS 2.0 was not too long ago, and the store aspect of that release was a complete debacle. That wasn’t the first time the store went down hard, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Okay, here’s a basic reality: sometimes, there’s absolutely nothing you can do. Sometimes, you simply can’t scale to meet the demand of a high-profile, high-demand launch. Everything I’ve seen about the iPhone, iPhone 2.0 and the App store indicates that interest and demand is something like an order of magnitude larger than anyone expected in their wildest dreams. They seemed to have planned for a couple of thousand developers, they got tens of thousands. Entire cities camped out to buy phones on day one (it seems).

So sometimes, you do your best, you know there are going to be problems, you weather them as well as you can, and hope it’s good enough. Eddy’s group has done wonders at hiding launch problems and solving them on the fly — I’ve literally seen flocks of people flying pallets of xserves down hallways and creating a fire-wagon line to get them unboxed, in racks, networked up and in the load balancers just to try to catch up with capacity demand on a launch day. You try that some day….

But sometimes, nothing you do is enough. By the way, have I pointed out that I don’t ever, EVER join you fanboys in those day 1 lines? I mean, seriously — you do this to yourself, and Apple does a great job of protecting you from yourself in this rather silly game. but throw enough drooling geeks at an intro, and stuff’s going to break, because capacity is always finite, it’s merely a matter of where you draw that line.

I don’t remember Aperture ever being anywhere near state-of-the-art. I do remember a rapid fire series of price cuts when it failed to shift enough units, though.

it was first to market by a good measure, and redefined how photos were handled on computer. Unfortunately, there were internal problems in the team (according to rumors) and getting it all straightened out took a while. By the time Aperture 2.0 finally saw the light of day, Lightroom had caught up and passed it, and even Photoshop CS3 and Bridge had made good progress. I was an early adopter of Aperture, and I admit, I finally gave up and moved to CS3/Bridge when I got tired of waiting. And this weekend, I’ll be trying out the Lightroom 2.0 release and seeing if I like it (I was whelmed by LR 1, didn’t bother — right now, I use Bridge and CS3). Aperture 2.0 caught up with, but didn’t really leapfrog, Lightroom 1, and Lightroom 2 really blows it away from what I can see, so Apple’s got a problem in trying to get Aperture back into this game seriously. Too bad. I admit: I really tried to get on with the Aperture team before I left apple, that’s how much I loved the initial product. Today — I own Aperture 2.0, but I’ve moved everything out of it to Bridge.

I’ve talked about Aperture a lot on my blog in the past. You can find most of that here. it’s a great idea that took too long to mature. Ohwell.

I regularly see iTunes Store errors here. Maybe the Canadian one less stable, but I always thought they shared the same back end.

it may have changed by now, but it all used to be one big glop o’ back-end. Which created lots of complications. Like my last big project for Apple, successful beyond it’s architecture, and you end up spending time making things work while you figure out how to rebuild it. I know they had a team involved in re-architecting stuff, I assume some or all of that is in place now (I hope).

And I’ll close with this: I hopped on MobileMe about a week after release; you’ll note that I’ve publicized my email address as chuqui@me.com (shouldn’t surprise anyone, given I used to use me@chuqui.com — which should still forward, fwiw). I also am using it to sync between my Macs, publish calendars, etc. the first week or so after I moved was a bit rocky, but these days, it seems solid and stable. I’m not pushing the envelope, but it’s the environment I was hoping to see; my stuff syncs across machines fine, so I don’t have to think about it. My email is in one place, and it’s someone else’s problem to maintain and support the hardware. I long ago gave up the idea of running all of my own stuff, because I found I was spending all of my time supporting myself and not actually creating new stuff. Now, if you’re a geek who likes to do that, fine. Me? I’d rather be doing photography and writing than installing patches into DNS, at least in my off-hours. go figure.

So MobileMe is worth the cost, hands down. And I expect it’ll only get better. After the rumored september announcements, I’ll make a decision about whether to go with an iPhone G3 or an iPod touch (or both), and until then, my Blackjack does just fine. and by not being in the day 1 line follies, I avoid the day 1 glitches, too. Some of you could learn from that thought, but probably won’t.

Oh, and this may offend some of you, but what the heck. We used to see these lines forming, and watch the blog reactions and the like with both amusement and fear. That people are that involved and dedicated to Apple “stuff” is both great, and a great responsibility. And we recognized that. We also mentioned William Shatner a lot…

Take care.

August 8 update: I’ve written some followup thoughts on this message here.

MobileMe Problems Show Apple Needs an Infrastructure Lesson – GigaOM:

Steve Jobs, in an internal email seen by Ars Technica, makes clear that he’s upset about the botched launch of MobileMe, Apple’s new online suite of applications that has been plagued with bugs, including being flat-out unavailable to some for days at a time.

Or as I have been saying to folks here at work, “just imagine Steve Jobs wandering the hall with a flame thrower in hand, asking random people ‘do you work on MobileMe?’

I expect a bunch of friends and people I know were involved in that project, and I feel really bad for them. But the reality is, the thing wasn’t ready and the release got botched. And Steve and Apple aren’t terribly tolerant of that kind of major screwup. I expect heads have rolled and there are a few tanned hides waiting for the welts to go away.

“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” he says. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”

There are two aspects to this. Steve is absolutely right — but also remember that ultimately, it was Steve’s call to go live (or not). he’s never been afraid to say “this ain’t ready” and pull something from release; his rehearsals for MacWorld Keynotes are legendary (and sometimes brutal), and stuff literally has disappeared in the last 24 hours, if he wasn’t satisfied with it.

So Steve has some responsibility here a swell, but with a caveat: someone he depended on to tell him what reality was told him it was ready to roll, and Steve believed him. And whoever told him that was wrong, and made everyone (including Steve and Apple) look bad. That’s not a good way to advance your career at Apple.

In his email, Jobs says: “The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services.” You can say that again. The big question in the wake of the MobileMe debacle is whether or not the company even knows how to plan for heavy load.

Or not. Gruber nails this (see below). MobileMe is a tiny thing compared to iTunes. Apple gets it, and executes it amazingly well.

That this release was botched isn’t about Apple not having a clue, but about the MobileMe people either blowing it (I can think of any number of scenarios — scaling it hard). The ultimate failure seemed to be more capacity planning mistakes than anything else, if I’m guessing right. but the ultimate failure was not being willing to tell Steve “we aren’t ready” and taking that heat. They thought they could release and make it work, and guessed very wrong (or thought they were in good shape, which is worse).

I have picked up some tidbits from my Internet infrastructure sources, who tell me that:

* There is no-unified IT plan vis-a-vis applications; each has their own set of servers, IT practices and release scenarios.
* Developers do testing, load testing and infrastructure planning, all of which is implemented by someone else.
* There’s no unified monitoring system.
* They use Oracle on Sun servers for the databases and everything has its own SAN storage. They do not use active Oracle RAC; it is all single-instance, on one box, with a secondary failover.
* Apparently they are putting web servers and app servers on the same machines, which causes performance problems.

One of my sources opined that Apple clearly wasn’t too savvy about all the progress made in infrastructure over the past few years. If this insinuation is indeed true, then there is no way Apple can get over its current spate of problems. It needs a crash course in infrastructure and Internet services. Apple’s problem is that it doesn’t seem to have recognized the fact that it’s in the business of network-enabled hardware.

Not completely true, not necessarily a bad thing.

Some areas of Apple “run their own show”, effectively using Apple’s IT datacenters as a hosting facilities. Others build and operate within Apple’s IT infrastructure. One of the groups that basically runs its own IT outside of Apple’s core IT group is Eddy Cue’s group — because of the way stuff Eddy is in charge of gets built and managed.

There are unified monitoring services — and each service also tends to run a layer above that to monitor specific details. That’s not a negative.

the Oracle/Sun single instance thing? true to a degree, but I don’t see it as a negative. And don’t forget, Apple runs the largest global single-instance SAP environment on this stuff. it’s not exactly doing things wrong.

The bottom line is — Apple’s got its act together here better than these informants want to imply. The failures aren’t because Apple doesn’t know how to do this — it does — it’s because this project got botched.

And now Eddy has been brought in to fix it, which means it’s going to get fixed.

Eddy’s name isn’t familiar to most apple people, but he’s in his way as important to apple’s success as Jonathan Ives. His specialty: the back-end infrastructures that make Apple’s online universe tick. His groups did the Apple online store, iTools (later .Mac), iTunes store, etc, etc. It’s the not-sexy part of the company, but it’s the guts that make all of the sexy front ends actually work.

I’m actually amazed that Eddy hasn’t been poached by a startup, much as I’m amazed that Tim Cook hasn’t been poached — but the reality is that if you survive and become one of Steve’s inner core of people he trusts (and that ain’t easy) — you tend to stay. Apple doesn’t generally get poached by startups or other places at the exec level often, anyone notice?

A lot of that is because it’s not easy working for Steve, but if you can do it, you get to do really great stuff, and that’s addictive. trust me. you just don’t see people running off from apple to CEO a startup the way you do Yahoo or Google, not out of the top few levels of the company.

Eddy’s real specialty is to be able to take what Steve asks for, implement it, hit the target dates, make it work, and KEEP THE DAMN THING A SECRET UNTIL STEVE ANNOUNCES IT. That’s a big reason why his team is self-contained. It also means his people can do what needs to be done to implement things that never existed before and which don’t fit into normal IT “this is how we do things” standards. he and his teams spends most of his time off in uncharted territory where a need to be innovative and flexible is a must, and yet they have to do it on huge scales.

On the other hand, Eddy’s no easier to work with than Steve is, for obvious reasons. I invariably warned people not to hire into his groups unless they wanted to donate their life to the cause. When I was there, I worked pretty closely with various parts of his world, and it was populated with equal who were just as maniacal about this as Eddy and steve and people who were in process of burning out. Not much middle ground (but it works).

(full disclosure time: Laurie worked with Eddy way back when; me, I once almost got re-orged into his world until management remembered my vow to die before working for him, and re-arranged reality to fit (otherwise, lists.apple.com never would have existed….) — but I had a chance to deal with him while I was there and I’ve got a lot more respect for him now than I used to. I still wouldn’t want to work in the kind of grind his organization demands, though, but it does pretty good work under really scary conditions.

So you can bet, MobileMe will get fixed.

The looks, UI and edge devices are only as good as the networking experience — whether it comes from Apple or from its partners. MobileMe could just be the canary in the coal mine as far as the Cupertino Kingdom is concerned. MobileMe isn’t that big a portion of their revenues right now, but what happens when the problems hit the iTunes store? Imagine the uproar when your 3G connections slow to a crawl because AT&T’s wireless backhaul can’t handle the traffic surge.

It might not be a problem of Apple’s making but the company will face the brunt of the backlash. Remember, most of us instinctively blame the device first, then curse the carrier.

Daring Fireball has the right view here:

Daring Fireball Linked List: Om Malik on MobileMe’s Infrastructure:

But the iTunes Store does gangbuster traffic and has terrific track record for uptime. The message I read from yesterday’s reorg that put MobileMe under Eddy Cue (Apple’s VP for iTunes) is that MobileMe could and should be as responsive and reliable as the iTunes Store.

Om just doesn’t know the Apple internals very well. This wasn’t Apple failing, it was one group within Apple blowing chunks. That happens — remember when Aperture was the state of the art? and now it’s fighting to catch up with Lightroom, and may simply never regain that dominance. ohwell.

Apple has the expertise; this isn’t a case of MobileMe problems crawling out into itunes, but Apple bringing the iTunes expertise into MobileMe. And having thrown Eddy Cue at the problem, that’s exactly what’s going to happen here.

Time For Apple To Get Serious About Apple TV (AAPL):

Apple executives continue to refer to their Apple TV set-top box business as a “hobby” — which is a polite word for “failure.” Time for that to change: If Steve Jobs wants to make a serious run at owning our living room’s “digital hub,” then Apple TV needs a serious overhaul, ASAP.

Why now? Because even though the industry is still nascent, the Internet-connected living room is becoming more of a realistic proposition. And the market is quickly getting more crowded.

Actually, it’s a polite word for “we’re dipping our toe in the water and seeing how the market matures. But the basic premise here is correct: the market has started maturing in a serious way, and it’s time for Apple to either decide to be a player, or get shoved into a niche. It may well decide being in a niche isn’t a bad idea here, by the way.

The two missing components to this market are starting to come together. First, bandwidth speeds; more and more people have network connections fast enough to support this. Second, the biggie: content.

I loved the concept of the Apple TV when it came out — and didn’t buy it. I loved the upgrades of Apple TV 2.0, and didn’t buy it. I think the Roku is an interesting box — and didn’t buy it.

Why? because the amount of content available for use via these streaming systems is still seriously limited. Compare the Netflix library with the iTunes movie/TV library (just try, for instance, to watch The Big Chill or The Dresser on either Apple TV or Roku. Unless your primary interest is whatever’s available on DirectTV/Cable Pay Per View, these other options aren’t really options yet.

Add to that the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war, which caused a lot of people to sit on the sidelines and wait for a victor before committing. You’re now seeing the product cycles that began when HD-DVD failed hitting market, and that’s going to be a major accelerator here.

Yesterday, LG announced it would begin selling a Blu-ray player in September that can play Netflix (NFLX) streaming movies — and other digital content — for “well under” $500. Wednesday, Dell (DELL) showed off a sexy new mini computer, starting at $499, with a built-in HDMI port for hi-def TVs and an optional Blu-ray drive. So on and so forth.

And Microsoft bringing Netflix to the Xbox 360.

Suddenly, Apple TV has lost most of whatever edge it may have had. It can play iTunes movies, and YouTube videos, and… well, that’s about it. Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster estimates Apple has sold 2.6 million Apple TVs since spring 2007, which sounds high to us. But no matter what the number is, Apple TV isn’t a mainstream product.

Apple never really had an edge here, didn’t really try to. In many ways, they simply threw this out to convince people there was a market here to develop (while minimizing their costs in developing it). Not the first time Apple has committed into a technology and waited for the rest of the industry to dive in. Apple realizes that a lot of industry players hate being first (think about it — Apple was the first to commit fully to CD-Rom’s on all computers, dropping floppy drives, USB, Firewire…) so sometimes they doo something to give the rest of the industry the ability to follow, because they know it’s a good long-term play.

So, no criticisms for Apple TV not being something it was never intended to be. It’s not a market driver, it’s not a market leader, it’s not a mainstream product. it was exactly what Apple said it was: a hobby, a toy/tool waiting for a market to happen.

Well, it’s happening. Time for Apple to get serious and get going.

So how can Steve Jobs change that?

It should be more like Apple’s Mac mini, which some serious home theater-types actually do use in their living rooms.

In theory, this also means that Apple is eventually inviting iTunes competitors like Netflix (NFLX) or Amazon (AMZN) onto its box, since they offer browser-based video services of their own. But better to have to compete for space on your own platform than have a platform no one uses.

Add an optional Blu-ray drive.

Yes, yes, yes. It needs to be the hub of the home theater — look at what Microsoft is doing with Xbox 360 (I love mine, by the way. Microsoft needs Blu-ray, too). Right now, it’s a stub on the home theater, tied to another mac. It needs to become the central player in the home theater, more like a console, less like an iPod. We’re not THAT far from where a computing system tied to the television is what ties all of the other devices in the home together. Apple TV has to decide to be that computing system, or it’ll be just another peripheral tied to something.

Right now, microsoft and the Xbox 360 is closest to what I want. I’ve been considering upgrading the DVD player to a blu-ray. originally thinking about a Playstation 3 (not a bad investment once you decide you’re buying a blu-ray anyway), but after Microsoft announced the netflix deal, I’m waiting again; rather see Xbox 360 add a blu-ray and buy a second blu-ray for the TV set than buy a PS3, and Playstation’s home theater strategy doesn’t impress me.

the LG box also intrigues me. The Apple TV is too dependent on iTunes, and iTunes’ library is too limited (I know, I know, my friends in iTunes-land are tired of me saying this, but they needed to buy Netflix years ago, or at least integrate access via iTunes). I’ve been gone from Apple 2 years and still nothing.

The next year is going to see massive changes in this space, a lot of maturing, really fast. and two years from now, the fight will be basically over. Here’s hoping we see Apple TV updates for the holiday market, if Steve waits for MacWorld in January, he may be too late.