Apple isn’t really known to be a company that makes self-critical statements. At the World Wide Developers Conference 2011, however, a notable statement was made during Steve Jobs’ last keynote speech. He had just elaborated on how a cloud should ensure that data is kept in sync across multiple device types in the future. “It just works,” promised Jobs — and then caused loud laughter and excitement in the audience when he added the question: “Why should I trust them! They’ve given us MobileMe?”
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especially the first few months were a debacle
MobileMe’s product launch was so disastrous that its reputation was tarnished. Although Apple was able to keep most of the problems under control, the online service continued to suffer bad karma. As the successor to .mac (“dot mac”), MobileMe was launched in the summer of 2008 and aimed to bring together the Mac and the still very young iPhone product line. Synchronization of contacts, calendar and push mail were among the main innovations – you had to pay $79 per year for it, which at the time was considered reasonable if it only worked.
Open letter: not our best times
The service was so incredibly unreliable for months that Apple even issued a statement saying it wasn’t the company’s finest hour. In an open letter, Steve Jobs named the obvious mistakes Apple had made. Simultaneously, the release of the App Store, iPhone 3G, iPhone OS 2.0 and MobileMe has taken a toll on Apple’s resources. It would have been better to release the functions gradually, as insufficient development and testing time were mainly responsible for the debacle. Internally, things were a little more carefree. For nearly an hour, Jobs lashed out at the MobileMe team for “hating myself for letting everyone down.” When asked at the meeting what the desired functionality of MobileMe is, Jobs replied “So why the crap doesn’t it?” Return.
10 years ago it was time to close
In June 2012, a year after the introduction of iCloud, MobileMe entered its final days. Apple turned off syncing of Dock icons, Settings, Passwords and Widgets, iDisk and MobileMe Photo Gallery. The end of the service came four years after it was launched, and since then there has been only iCloud as Apple’s cloud service. On the other hand, it started off quite smoothly, as Apple this time focused on a few, more reliable functions. Well, one thing hasn’t changed: then as of now, iCloud only offers 5GB of storage in the free version.
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