There’s nothing majorly wrong with Apple’s MobileMe service. All of its subsidiary pieces and parts—the email, the syncable calendar and contacts, the photo gallery, the online storage—do fine. So why doesn’t it make sense?
Apple just sent out an email to MobileMe subscribers to let them know of some new(ish) features. The biggest bullet point is the fact that push is back.
Apple’s tacking on an addition 60 days to the 30 days it already doled out to MobileMe subscribers, which means you’ve got an entire three months extra to wait out the issues you’ve been having. Apple sent out these emails today to MobileMe subscribers, but if you’re one of the ones with MobileMe mail snags, you might not have gotten it. Well you’ve seen it now! Apple has some more clarifications in case you’re not sure if you qualify. [Apple]
When we brought you news of Steve Jobs’ displeasure at the stumbling launch of MobileMe, we wondered what was happening in the management structure of the service. The chaps at Valleywag have worked it out, and it’s a classic. The guy now in charge of MobileMe, and all of Apple’s online services—Eddy Cue—was actually originally in charge of the iTunes Store: the place where service outages really messed up the iPhone 3G’s launch. Remember the iPocalypse? Hmmm. That now makes us wonder what happened to Cue’s former boss Sina Tamaddon (on the right in the pic) and Rob Schoeben, who was in charge of MobileMe’s launch. Did they too get punishment promotions? [Valleywag]
Ars has decided to the release the full email Steve Jobs sent to Apple employees declaring that “MobileMe was simply not up to Apple’s standards.” There’s actually not much you haven’t already read, other than the additional admonishment that it “was not our finest hour.” Granted, that probably means at least 20 more people were flayed than we originally believed. Here’s the whole thing:
We all know that Apple’s MobileMe had a difficult birth: but it’s quite another thing to be able to read the criticisms of the service from his Steveness himself. And over at Ars Technica they’ve got hold of an internal Apple email that Steve Jobs sent out to Apple employees detailing his displeasure that MobileMe was “not up to Apple’s Standards.” It needed both more time in testing, and a piece-by-piece launch, rather than attempting to launch it as a “monolithic service,” he thinks.
As of yesterday evening, Apple claims the bugs that have plagued the service since its launch have been worked out, including restoring the mail accounts of users that were locked out for nearly two weeks and resolving a new bug that caused devices to drop calendar and contact data when syncing wirelessly. With those issues behind them Apple has resolved to switch gears and focus on improving other areas of the service. Appleinsider forum members are still reporting problems though, so this resolution may still be a little premature. [MobileMe Status via Appleinsider]
Mossberg has rolled out an in-depth review of MobileMe backed by a week of testing in today’s WSJ, and if you’ve been following our coverage it won’t come as too big of a surprise that he’s not a fan. But his problems with the service go well beyond the launch hiccups you’ve read about. So what’s got Mossberg so riled up that he’s thrown down his big badhammer on MobileMe?
If you’ve been reading all about the Mobile Me rollout with scorn for its Apple-ness, Microsoft just opened up more preview slots for its Live Mesh service that similarly syncs files and info across all of your devices in the cloud (including Macs–later). While the service can be a bit hard to parse at times, its breadth of device coverage and open API look promising. Jump in with your Windows Live account now before spots run out. [Live Mesh via All About Microsoft]
Apple’s MobileMe service hit so many snags during its launch period that Apple have just issued an email apology to members. Saying “The transition from .Mac to MobileMe was a lot rockier than we had hoped,” Apple’s apologising with a 30-day membership extension for free to anyone who was a .Mac member with an active account as of July 9, 2008 and new MobileMe members who created accounts on or before July 15, 7:00 PM PDT. Details can be found on the Apple support page here. The email also apologises for the controversy over the speediness of “push” services, and says that Apple’s not using the term until it really is “near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.”
