Apple's streaming service iTunes Match is down this morning.
Yesterday, Apple's text messaging alternative, iMessage was down. So was FaceTime, its video chatting service.
The iTunes Match issue comes less than a week after a lot of people (myself included) signed up for a second year of Apple's streaming service. iTunes Match takes your entire music library, stores it in the cloud, and then allows you to stream it from any Apple device you own.
The iTunes Match problem, coupled with the frequent outages of iMessage show how unbelievably bad Apple is at Internet services.
This is going to be a problem if Apple wants to beat Android. Google, with its years of data and web services, doesn't have the same sort of downtime issues.
Apple's number one selling point used to be "it just works." Well, it doesn't just work if it's not working.
And Apple gives users no clues about why their text messages aren't sending or why they suddenly can't listen to music on their phone. The music just stops working. And the iMessages are just in this purgatory of "sending," without being sent.
So, people are just going to get mad at Apple and its inability to deliver on its promises.
The really odd thing about Apple's Internet problems is that the guy in charge of the Internet for Apple, Eddy Cue, keeps getting more and more responsibilities.
Cue is SVP of Internet Software and Services. That means he's responsible for iTunes Match and iMessage, which is constantly crashing. When Apple pushed out Scott Forstall, Cue was given Maps and Siri, two data heavy Internet services. It's Cue's job to fix those apps.
But if he's struggling to keep iMessage online, how is he going to fix Maps and Siri, which are two much bigger challenges?
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