Getting there eventually is not an experience I usually associate with Apple. Famously, their stuff Just Works. The launch of the iPhone 3G in the UK has been a clear and frustrating exception this week. OK, demand peaks like this are always terrible things to manage, but did Apple compound the issue by trying to do too much at once?

After all, they were attempting to do a lot. A near-worldwide simultaneous launch led to shortages everywhere. They knew there was pent-up demand for the product. Is frustrating your most loyal customers because of insufficient day one stock really the best way of building brand favour? A company as exposed and reliant on good public opinion as Apple should have managed this far better.

And in the UK, their airtime partner, O2, didn’t help with the image perception either. Existing customers were given the ability to sign up for an upgraded phone a week in advance. They wrote a clever AJAX-based site, and hosted it on Akamai for load-tolerance. Unfortunately, it relied on O2’s back-end systems, which were just not powerful enough to cope. And when the back end systems failed to work perfectly, the front-end didn’t fail gracefully - users got a range of confusing errors, and a fallback page that itself didn’t work.

On Friday itself, O2 were again in difficulties. Their user management systems failed within 10 minutes of store-opening. The staff at my store switched back to paper and processed people as fast as possible.

My initial experience in registering my new phone via the online store was fine. By the end of the day however it was completely overloaded, with complaints registered all round the world. Failing to anticipate *this* demand was ridiculous. Apple had the ability to *calculate* this demand, and failed to do so.

The other concurrent launch - that of Mobile Me - was just as troubled. Supposed to have gone live on Thursday, it wasn’t until late on Friday that it launched in the UK, and was equally completely overloaded, to the point of complete unusability. The web site stabilised by Saturday lunchtime, and push synching - the must-have feature - was working by early Saturday evening. The reports on the O2 forums of Apple billing people in their free trial period are worrying though.

I’m writing this on Sunday morning, and it all seems stabilised now. We got there eventually. However, Friday is an experience with Apple that I don’t wish to repeat. There are planning and scaling lessons to be learned, both by Apple and its partners. Let’s hope the next big launch of this nature is less frustrating for all concerned.