Apple is actually not known as a company that tends to make self-critical statements. At the World Wide Developers Conference 2011, however, a remarkable statement was made during Steve Jobs’ last keynote. He had just explained in detail how a cloud should ensure that data is kept in sync across multiple device types in the future. “It just work,” Jobs promised – and then caused loud laughter and excitement in the audience when he added the question: “Why should I trust them! They’re the ones who gave us MobileMe?”
Statement at 1:23:00
The first few months in particular were a debacle
MobileMe’s product launch was so disastrous that its reputation was simply tarnished. Although Apple was able to get most of the problems under control, the online service suffered from persistent bad karma. As the successor to .mac (“Dot Mac”), MobileMe was launched in the summer of 2008 and was intended to bring the Mac and the still very young iPhone product line closer together. Synchronization of contacts, calendars and push mail were among the main innovations – you had to pay 79 dollars a year for it, which many considered reasonable at the time if it only worked.
Open letter: Not our best hour
The service was so notoriously unreliable for months that Apple even issued a statement acknowledging it was not the company’s finest hour. In an open letter, Steve Jobs named the obvious mistakes Apple had made. Simultaneously releasing the App Store, iPhone 3G, iPhone OS 2.0 and MobileMe has overwhelmed Apple’s resources. It would have been better to release functions gradually, because insufficient development and testing time were primarily responsible for the debacle. Internally, things were a bit more careless. For about an hour, Jobs loudly berated the MobileMe team for “hating themselves for letting everyone down.” When asked in the meeting what the desired functionality of MobileMe was, Jobs answered “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” return.
10 years ago it was closing time
In June 2012, a year after iCloud was introduced, 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 had come four years after the start, and since then there has only been iCloud as Apple’s cloud service. Its start, on the other hand, went quite smoothly, because this time Apple concentrated on a few, more reliable functions. By the way, one thing has not changed: Then as now, iCloud only offers 5 GB of storage in the free version.