Apple sure is doing a lot to hype this whole MobileMe thing, and I am a bit surprised how many people are actually buying into it. Yes, .Mac is one giant wad of internet suckage. Yes, I have been paying for it for 3 unbearable years. I just cannot believe that Apple ever looked at that product and thought for one minute that they were actually providing $99 worth of value to their customers. They essentially had to extort an extension of the service by holding your email address (that I personally got for free with iTools) hostage until you ponied up some cash.
Where were all the benefits?
iDisk works on occasion, although its perceived primary benefit is that you can access stuff from your Mac from a PC online, the only problem is that access from a PC rarely works.
Back to My Mac? Yeah, that doesn’t work either. Ever!
Well surely they delivered on those free exclusive Dashboard Widgets, I mean, come on low hanging fruit people! Yeah, you don’t get those either.
Yeah, but you get a sweet web email client that looks and works just like Mail.app, right? Riiiight… The web mail client. The one that is incapable of accessing your Address Book contacts even though they are synced via the very same .Mac service (Oh, and iSync is just a fancy word for destroy all of your data). The same email client that when you reply to a reply to a message that you initiated, it cannot understand any of the addresses. You read me correctly: it cannot understand the addresses that it created. This is web based email! Technologies that have been around since 1994.
If one single member of the .Mac team made it through to the MobileMe team, they might as well wave the white flag. It is utterly flabbergasting that everyone seems to be able to work with and effectively sync with the Apple native apps, with the exception of Apple. Google is eating their lunch (and what a meager lunch it is).
Yes, it is likely that I will again use .Mac in the form of MobileMe. Yes, I am sure that it will fail to deliver. There is a clear implication that they are hoping to achieve a degree of cloud computing (defined by Apple as a secure online server – uh oh.) with Mobile Me, by providing ubiquitous access to email, calendar, contacts and photos. I just don’t understand how they intend to do this and surpass existing technologies like Gmail, Google Calendar, Plaxo, and Flickr. They have some serious ground to make up just to get in the game and a debacle like .Mac most certainly will not cut it.
The signs of the inevitable utter failure are already apparent. The person who is going to see real value in MobileMe is the person who isn’t comfortable with the existing products in the market. They need it to come nice and neatly bundled in a service (that should but doesn’t) come bundled with their hardware. You can tell by the incredibly dumbed-down Guided Tour that they have produced. And yet Apple is advertising it as “Exchange for the rest of us.” Wait, the person who is uncomfortable loading their pictures to a photo hosting site, understands the role and significance of the server that runs behind Outlook??? That user is lucky to differentiate Outlook from Excel. And what is up with the turn of the century MobileMe logo?
Apple has blatantly disregarded what .Mac could have been to the degree that it has infuriated pretty much every customer of the service. Almost as if by accident, they created the the most powerful device for cloud computing in the iPhone and all of a sudden want a piece of the online app market lest iPhone owners go elsewhere – as the current web apps have likely driven them to do. They have a tremendous advantage for Mac users in that they can offer seamless integration between apps and hardware with minimal configuration similar to iTunes and the iPod (in fact, ‘iTunes for the rest of your life’ might have been a better tag line). The question is whether people are likely to pay $99 for this kind of service considering the value that they have received in the past.
Note: At the time of this post, .Mac’s webmail service is down; sigh.
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