In 2008 Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), launch MobileMe, sort of iCloud which worked much worse and was a bit more expensive, and at that time Steve Jobs he was strong enough to reprimand his employees severely. MobileMe was criticized by an extremely large number of people, Apple was put on the wall for launching a product that was not supposed to reach the market, and Steve Jobs poured out his frustrations on those who built the service, firing in a meeting the managers who oversaw the development of MobileMe. Unfortunately, the problem of launching a bad service has more to do with how Steve Jobs he treated his employees even less with an attempt to rush the market of a service that was not ready.
We had been telling our bosses that we did not feel confident about our launch date for a long time. We gave any number of suggestions of what we could do to launch that wouldn't be such a giant production, but would totally have worked. Then it fell down launch night. And all the lovely troopers (because everyone who works at Apple is completely kick-ass and does the hell out of their jobs), worked literally around the clock to fix it. Sleeping under desks, shuttling from hotels nearby, tagging in the next coder for their shift, until it was back up.
In an article published today, an employee who worked on the development of MobileMe he revealed some information from behind the scenes of that failure, but also about Steve Jobs. It's about a woman who didn't like Jobs and who says that the employees were so afraid of him that they were afraid to tell him when they couldn't do something. This was also the case of the MobileMe service that arrived on the market because the employees were afraid to tell Jobs that they could not fulfill his requirements, and you can find all the details on that page.
Once it was up, we (at least a hundred of us) got called into a meeting with Steve Jobs. We all walked over to the building like we were headed to the guillotine. He stood in front of us and yelled at us, told us that we should be mad at each other, said we could have done a staggered launch and complained that we didn't even try to do all the things that we (those on the ground floor of production that actually make the fucking products of the world) had been begging to do. It was the world's best motivational speech.
