It’s official: MobileMe is a flop
David Pogue of The New York Times calls it ”Apple’s MobileMess”. Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal says it is ”far too flawed to be reliable.” When Apple is hearing these sorts of things about MobileMe from a usually unmistakable Apple fanboy (Pogue) and a man who has called the iMac “the best desktop PC on the market at many price” (Mossberg), in addition to thousands of unsatisfied customers, former .Mac members and new members of the bandwagon alike, I think it’s pretty clear that they have not “finally got it right” as far as their online services are concerned, as Steve Jobs said at WWDC.
MobileMe’s launch was, as the former .Mac members among us are well aware, a complete disaster that took days to finally get somewhat right. In fact, not all of the launch issues have been worked out even now, two weeks after MobileMe’s initial release.
To add to the chaos associated with its launch, there have long been gripes about MobileMe’s horrendous branding and the abandonment of the mac.com domain name for Apple’s online offerings. Many have said that the whole “me.com” branding reminds them of another disastrous tech product: Microsoft’s Windows ME.
While I could understand Apple’s need to move away from the Mac centric branding because MobileMe is not a Mac centric service, I have to say I am seriously disappointed with their branding on this one. Apple’s marketing and branding are usually superb, and I expect much better from them. I, for one, am not thrilled about the idea of paying $99 per year for “push” e-mail anyway, and I wouldn’t use a “@me.com” e-mail address even if I could get it for free. Don’t we have enough narcissism in our society today? Do we really need our e-mail to reflect that?
I think it’s pretty clear that Apple’s MobileMe is even more of a flop than .Mac was. While .Mac wasn’t perfect and wasn’t a great value, at least it was farily reliable and offered a professional sounding e-mail address. All that MobileMe offers is extremely buggy service and a juvenile sounding e-mail address. I expect much better from Apple. I think we all do.
Via [The New York Times] and [The Wall Street Journal]
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it’s worked flawlessly for me since launch day except for one tiny outage (granted, I really only use it to sync address book and calendar data)—stop whining already!—and let’s put $99/year in perspective, shall we? that’s like $8/month...a steal once they get it working as well as .mac did (I expect these teething pains to be done within a week or two)—and if you don’t like the @me.com email address, don’t use it (I don’t!)
on July 24, 2008 at 06:41 PM - LINKNew MobileMe users don’t have a choice - they must use the @me.com e-mail address. And you’ve been very lucky to have it work flawlessly for you, because you are in the bast minority. I was just a free trial user to test it out, and I couldn’t log in to use it until a couple of days after the launch. Even then it was slow and buggy...and most of what I’ve heard from .Mac members and various other places around the net was that the launch was a disaster.
on July 24, 2008 at 07:15 PM - LINKI lost my iPod Touch soon after i’ve enable push synchronization on that device. Now I am worried that my calendar, emails and contact would fall into the wrong hands (or already did). Since I changed my MobileMe password just to prevent further “push” on to that device, most of all I am kinda disappointed that MobileMe has no remote wipe function which is only exclusive to MS Exchange service.
Besides, I am currently looking for alternative way to sync up my macs as i don’t think i would wanna renew my MobileMe subscription when it expires later this year.
on July 24, 2008 at 07:39 PM - LINKhttp://desktopvibes.com/mobileme-exchange-for-the-rest-of-us/
on July 24, 2008 at 11:45 PM - LINKI agree that MobileMe has some small flaws but I definitely do not agree that narcissism and reminders of Windows ME are the biggest issues. The price is pretty darn good, and the system works pretty well and will probably work even better once Apple gets the launch kinks ironed out.
Are there any other issues that you could point out that weren’t mentioned here?
on July 25, 2008 at 09:03 AM - LINKI was also put off by the narcissistic domain name, but I’m over that now. I disagree that it is a flop. Nothing that works for the majority of users is a flop. That isn’t to say that the people who have had and still have serious problems with it aren’t important; they are.
Apple introduced four major products in (what was it? twenty countries?) on the same day, all of which impacted their servers, and the volume of business was clearly much higher than they expected. They had server outages for activations, downloads, and MobileMe, and the MobileMe outages had ramifications for delay. I say that Apple didn’t anticipate the volume of business because shortages and server overloads don’t make happy customers.
MobileMe is not a flop, but it is a serious problem for Apple and for users who are still having problems. I’m sure that someone in Cupertino is learning a whole new and more colorful vocabulary, and is working hard to avoid a bad performance review the next time around.
MobileMe isn’t for everyone, but it will be fine within a month.
on July 25, 2008 at 09:26 AM - LINKMark,
I think that MobileMe is still overpriced. It’s theoretically a better value than .Mac provided that they get the issues straightened out, but with Yahoo offering free push IMAP e-mail for the iPhone (http://mobile.yahoo.com/iphone/mail), I think that Apple really needs to consider dropping the price. Yes MobileMe is better because it syncs your address book and contacts too, but is it $99 better? I don’t think it is.
BTW, the point of this is not to bash Apple. I’m an Apple fan. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be blogging here. My point is that Apple is far from “getting it right” with their online services and I just wanted to share my views as to why I believe it is not worth the money and is still very flawed.
on July 25, 2008 at 10:17 AM - LINK