From what I know from a few engineers that were directly involved in the MobileMe launch, yes the failure was in the engineering management that did not want to

From what I know from a few engineers that were directly involved in the MobileMe launch, yes the failure was in the engineering management that did not want to listen to the engineers/project managers/qa folks, but instead wanted to please SJ by showing nice Ajax UI. This is why the VP of MobileMe was let go soon after: he came from Microsoft/Starbucks, and did surround himself with various ex-microsoft folks. If you know folks at Apple that were in that group at the time, you will find out that the failure did happen at the VP/Director level that didn't want to listen to the project managers / engineering leads / QA leads.