iOS 5 Update: Steve Jobs Rolling Over Already?

I understand the title of this post may be insensitive and nothing could be further from the goal of this piece. In fact, if anything, I admire Steve Jobs so much that I feel this entry needed to be made in order to honor his memory.

The question which our industry is asking today is how could Apple screw up the iOS 5 update so badly – literally a week or so after the death of Steve Jobs? I realize of course the two incidents aren’t related but one has to wonder if all those devices that Steve keeps in his office wouldn’t have have had a hiccup or two – causing him to sound the alarm bells that this upgrade was not ready.

As I mentioned earlier today – I went into the upgrade cautiously and an iPhone 4 was upgraded without a hitch but an iPad 2 crashed, giving me the error message below. I sent an email to my IT team and they suggested rebooting and retrying – apparently there are cases where an upgrade had to be performed four times to get it to work.

ipad-upgrade-fail-ios-5.png

I was lucky. I turned the iPad off and on and then tried again and it worked.

But I am now left with no programs on my devices. I had to subsequently go to my PC and redecide which programs to sync – and to make matters worse I now have hours of program reorganizing to do. About 150 programs are scattered individually – seemingly randomly on various screens. Decisions, decisions – does Skype go in a VoIP folder or is it part of social?

We all know Apple is uniquely positioned in the world of tech and we also know that Amazon is coming on strong with its Kindle Fire and now Asus has a Zenbook ultrabook designed exclusively to take on the MacBook Air. And of course Google isn’t letting up with its Android attacks.

The point here is Apple still has a halo around it – but the world of tech is unforgiving. Just look at RIM, Nokia or H-P to see what I mean. Or just look at Apple about 15 years ago.

The company needs to be aggressive and forward-looking but also has to keep in mind we are used to a certain level of perfection from Cupertino. Lose the perfection… Lose the leading-edge style. Lose the passion and you may as well be any other company in tech. And once that happens, we may be entering a new phase of the market where the world gravitates towards Asus or Samsung or who knows what new company?

Consumers are fickle. You need to win them over and keep winning them over. Steve Jobs knew this and held his company to a very high standard. Now is the time for Apple employees to ensure they keep the company up to his standards.

Let’s hope this is the last hiccup for a while.

Disclosure: I own Apple shares

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