mobileme

Apple CEO Steve Jobs admits on an internal email that the updated .Mac Internet portal is “not up to Apple’s standards.”

The memo was posted online at Ars Technica on August 5th and reinforces what iPhone and computer users of the new Apple service have been clamoring about since it launched; MobileMe just isn’t ready for primetime.

MobileMe was introduced as an update to the old .Mac web portal at the 2008 Apple Developers Conference in June under much fanfare. The MobileMe service was touted as a companion for the updated iPhone 3G with Exchange “push” features that would supply home users with many of the same advantages found on corporate Exchange servers.

MobileMe Has Been Mobile-Missfire for Apple.

From day one MobileMe was plagued with issues. For $99.00 a year users were offered features including sync services for their email, contacts, and calendar across their iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC devices. Instead the service was plagued with bugs and outages. MobileMe was frequently unavailable and synchronization was a crapshoot. Apple apologized for the snags and gave MobileMe subscribers a free 30-day extension.

The Nitty Gritty Steve Jobs MobileMe Memo.

In the memo from Jobs’ the Apple CEO admits that MobileMe was not up to Apple standards and that the application clearly needed more time and testing. Jobs’ goes on to imply that Apple might have bitten off more than it could chew with the simultaneous MobileMe/iPhone 3G launch, that it “was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”

Why MobileMe if You Can Get It for Free?

Many of the .Mac features, originally a free service called “iTools,” introduced at the 2000 Macworld Expo, could be found on the Internet for much less than the Apple price tag of $99.00. Free services such as Gmail, Flickr, Box.net and Google CalDav syncing offered many of the same features available with .Mac, albeit without the tight integration and ease of use .Mac brought to the table.

If Apple wanted to grow their .Mac subscriber base, they had to offer new features to the service and give users a compelling reason to renew and to woo new customers over to the Apple .Mac fold. The Exchange features offered with MobileMe in tandem with the insanely popular iPhone seemed like a home run when the service was introduced at the Apple Developers Conference. Unfortunately the MobileMe service and bug issues that Apple experienced bred a user backlash Apple is not used to experiencing from its fervent fan-base. The MobileMe bite so far has proved to be a bitter pill for both Apple and MobileMe users.