Apple, Microsoft Issues Manage to Annoy Users
New year just like the old year
"Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss," states a lyric from the song Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who.
New year glitches, same as old year glitches, if you'll excuse my paraphrasing.
Starting us off in 2011 is news that Apple iPhoneswere having problems with their alarm application not working on January 1 and 2. However, Apple said it was aware of the problem, and seemed to indicate that everything would be okay by today, January 3rd, without users having to do anything special.
A Reutersstory yesterday quoted an Apple spokesperson as saying:
"We're aware of an issue related to non-repeating alarms set for January 1 or 2... Customers can set recurring alarms for those dates and all alarms will work properly beginning January 3."
Well, reports are coming out today that for some iPhone users, anyway, the iPhone alarm app still is not working properly. According to this post at iPhone FAQ:
"Though many owners have reported their iPhone alarms did indeed begin functioning properly today, for many of you it did not. The problem seems to be that alarms that were scheduled to go off on Jan 1 or Jan 2 failed today, and will presumably fail going forward. Repeated testing of these previously scheduled alarms has confirmed this. "
The fix, says iPhone FAQ, apparently is to delete your old alarms and start afresh beginning with today.
Apple would not say how many iPhones were likely affected by the bug. Over 70 million iPhones have been sold worldwide.
Last year, the Apple iPhones alarm clock app had trouble dealing with daylight savings time changes in various countries, such as Australia, the UK, and the US.
Microsoft has been taking its lumps, too, this time in regard to its Hotmail service. A number of Hotmail users have been complaining that their email folders had disappeared without warning. According to this APstory, this issue began in early November 2010 and has been steadily increasing since then, with 489 pages of complaints appearing on Microsoft's on-line message board.
Microsoft posted a note yesterday saying that it had (finally) identified the source of the issue and that it had fixed the problem. However, Microsoft also gave a link (see note above) to post a message if a Hotmail user continues to have problems.
Like Apple, Microsoft refused to say how many of its 360 million Hotmail users were affected by the glitch.
As I said, the new year is already looking a lot like the old year.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.