Steve Jobs is not a manager who suffers fools, gladly or otherwise. In the early days of Apple, he was famous for categorizing employees by their "bozo bit," set at either 0 or 1, and for flipping his assessment from one to the other in the space of an elevator ride.

So what's he going to do about whoever is in charge of MobileMe?

For readers who haven't been losing e-mail, screwing up syncs, tracking the MobileMe discussion boards (96,000 messages as of Friday morning, more than 340,000 views) or reading the reviews (Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal gave it a rare "can't recommend," David Pogue at the New York Times escalated it to "the real problem is how Apple is responding"), suffice it to say that MobileMe, which went more or less live on July 10, is Apple's worst product launch in the 10 years since Jobs returned from exile.

In Apple's defense, MobileMe is an ambitious project — promising cloud computing and enterprise-quality syncing of e-mail, contacts and calendar appointments to millions of users for $99 a year. After a sputtering start (accompanied by a formal apology and a 30-day free subscription extension) parts of it are working moderately well. MacWorld, in the most exhaustive review yet, gave it three and half mice out of five.

But the five or six hours I lost e-mail contact with the world this week were bad enough; I can't imagine what it's been like for the estimated 20,000 loyal Apple customers who paid their $99 (or $149 for a family pack) and haven't had e-mail service for more than a week.

Apple (AAPL) has not said which of its managers was in charge of the development of MobileMe, who chose that unfortunate name, or who decided to launch it at the same time the rest of the company was busy trying to get iPhone 2.0, the App Store, and the iPhone 3G out the door.

At the World Wide Developers Conference in June, it was Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president for product marketing, who demoed it, leaving the strong impression that MobileMe would "push" contact and calendar changes nearly instantaneously from Mac to iPhone to PC and back — an impression that Apple was forced to correct last week. And it was Steve Jobs himself who called it "Exchange for the rest of us," as if MobileMe could match the performance of Microsoft's (MSFT) competing product. The company's retail sales staff has since been instructed to stop using that phrase.

It's more than likely heads will roll over this botched roll-out — if they haven't already. But given Jobs' well-documented propensity for micromanagement, it's also possible that he was warned that the product wasn't ready for primetime and wouldn't take "no" for an answer.

If that's the case, the blame for MobileMe may be his.

The upside of simultaneously launching four major products — the iPhone 3G, the App Store, iPhone firmware 2.0 and MobileMe — in more than 20 countries around the world is that you get people's attention.

That's not an easy thing to do in this media-saturated age.

The downside of this form of event marketing — which Steve Jobs pioneered — is that you risk blowing it on a really big stage, in this case by overloading your servers and triggering a global customer satisfaction meltdown.

That's what happened to Apple (AAPL) on Friday. Too many of the iPhone's six-million existing customers tried to upgrade to the new firmware just as hundreds of thousand of new iPhone 3G customers were trying to activate their phones on the same iTunes servers.

Complicating matters were spot breakdowns in credit card readers, EasyPay PCs, and the AT&T (T) activation system that failed last year. (AT&T, as Fortune.com reported, was quick to blame this year's problems on Apple.)

The result was a rolling meltdown across the Earth's timezones that Gizmodo dubbed the iPocalypse — a coinage that quickly spread (see, for example, the New York Times and All Things Digital.)

[CORRECTION: Credit may actually belong to a Gizmodo reader -- one brianhatch -- who wrote "my god, it's the iPocalypse" in a comment date-stamped Friday, 10:09 a.m. EDT.]

Suffering the most were the hundreds of people who had queued up outside Apple Stores — in some cases for as long as a week. Last year the lines moved quickly because the phones could be purchased with the swipe of a credit card and activated at home. This year's purchase procedure, already complicated by the requirement that customers sign an extended contract with a carrier before leaving the store, bogged down entirely. Progress at the back of the lines slowed to a glacial pace.

The iTunes servers came back up late Friday and by Saturday morning the activation problems were mostly resolved.

But MobileMe, the new basket of Web applications that Apple had promised to have running Wednesday night, was still not working. Visitors trying to use the service got instead this error message (in four languages):

The MobileMe transition is underway but is taking longer than expected. While core services such as desktop mail, iDisk and sync are available, the new MobileMe web applications are not yet online. Thank you for your patience as we complete the upgrade.

For a first-hand account of our descent into activation hell, see Live! From the Fifth Ave. iPhone line.

UPDATE: As several readers have noted, MobileMe works if you go to http://www.me.com. Inexplicably, the mac.com address still produces that four-language error message.

UPDATE 2: Midafternoon Saturday: received an automated message from Apple that MobileMe is working now.

For those who couldn't be there, Apple (AAPL) has posted the video of the keynote address in its entirety.

Available here in QuickTime and MPEG-4.

For our coverage of the event, click here.