Philippine Cell Phones

Apple had some launch day bumbles…

With Apple’s servers overloaded and unable to accommodate customer demand, eager buyers who had camped out all week to acquire the new phone were thwarted. Though the new-generation phones were designed to be activated in-store, salespeople instructed customers Friday to go home, connect the phone to a personal computer and download new software to activate it.

Reminds me of what happened to Globe Telecom around 10 years ago when they introduced the short message system service (SMS).  A company with a very popular product encounters unexpected problems.

“It’s been crazy the whole day,” he said. “Our server has been really busy and has been timing out.” - Apple Tech support

Now isn’t this just a happy problem?  You have so much demand for your product that your servers can’t cope up. I’d love this to happen to my company. Eventually, it was resolved:

On a day that should have been a celebration for the company, Apple’s stock fell more than 2%. Toward the end of the day, however, many of the early technical problems seemed to have been resolved. By 6 p.m., after retrying several times, Kroll said he was able to download and use the free apps he had selected.

And the lesson?

“…is that nobody executes perfectly, not even Apple.’