An open letter to Steve Jobs

Okay, Apple has just about won. I’m in tears and I’m ready to give up. Why on earth would you do this to your customers?

When you made your great migration from Mac.com to MobileMe, you trashed my blog, which is something I write to every day and which gets about 1000 hits a month. Some posts get four times that many hits in a day. Not that it’s the end of the world, of course, I mean it’s not an earthquake in China, so I guess we have to keep this in perspective, but it’s still making me cry.

After spending the ENTIRE FLICKING DAY dorking around at the Apple store yesterday, buying an OS upgrade that I didn’t need or want, and waiting OVER EIGHT HOURS for the seven required downloads to happen, I STILL can’t publish through iWeb. Every time I hit publish, I get the “error in publishing” message. It publishes the post I’m trying to put up, but it won’t let anyone post comments. When you click “add a comment,” you get that GD “Welcome to Mobile ME” screen. So my readers get an ad for your new service, not an opportunity to comment on my posts. Thank you so very, very much.

More recent posts don’t even show the “add comment” link.

The internal links are corrupted, especially in the “Archives” section.

I have been run around Robin Hood’s barn by your people. The staff at the Biltmore don’t even bother to answer the phone. I got through to someone at Chandler-it would consume half a tank of $4.30/gallon gasoline for me to drive to Chandler!!!!!!!-and she made an appointment for me at the Biltmore, dropping me into a madhouse of frenzied consumers who feel they can’t live without your latest toy and who must have it right this minute. She also erred in saying that since I wanted my money back for the mac.com subscription I now can’t use (it won’t accept my Quicken backups, either) Apple would upgrade my computer for free. Ohhh nooooo! Not at all! So I got a good gouge at a moment when I am so broke I can barely afford to buy groceries. Your manager gave me a 50% discount, but 50% of “I can’t afford it” is still “I can’t afford it.” Thank you thank you thank you.

You have lots of instructions on your MobileMe site. Most of them are incomprehensible — I haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about. After pondering through several pages, I realized that nothing there seemed to apply to the problem. I was told that after I finished jumping through yesterday’s endless flaming hoops, my system would work. Period. “Plug and Play.”

Can you fix my iWeb? If you can’t, will you please be truthful about it? If this can’t be fixed and I have to close my site, I want a refund of the hundred bucks you “automatically” charged to my credit card for Mac.com a month ago.

While my computer will still publish (barely), I’m posting this complaint on my blog. May 7,000 people read it and copy it to their blogs! May StumbleUpon, De.lici.ous, and Digg all pick it up at once!

Kindly tell me, in words that I can understand, what I need to do to get iWeb to publish in your user-unfriendly new environment and how I can get my Quicken to back up to your unreachable new servers.
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To my readers–

Well, my friends, it’s beginning to look very unlikely that my computer will ever regain enough functionality for me to continue this blog. Tomorrow I will try to post the Carnival of Money Stories, and I guess after that it’s good-bye.

It was fun while it lasted. Best wishes to you all!