Nearly a week after Apple’s internet suite of applications Mobile Me has been released, The Wall Street Journal’s highly respected Digital Tech Columnist Walt Mossberg calls the service “Far Too Flawed To Be Reliable,” in addition to him “Not being able to recommend it.”
Mossberg does not have a very positive outlook on Apple’s Mobile Me situation. Although it seems as though he wants to use the service himself, stating the $100 annual price tag more than reasonable, he simply says that he cannot recommend the service to anyone (at this point).
Mossberg continues to explain other issues he was having. Synced contacts on the iPhone appeared without numbers, displaying names only, while loading slowly on the device.
While Mossberg isn’t the only one having these issues, he is a highly respected digital technology columnist who’s review further cements the hurdles that Apple simply cannot seem to get over with their web-based services. In other words, when he speaks, people listen. For Walt to go on record saying that he cannot recommend Mobile Me to anyone, it seems as though Apple is once again in a rather sticky situation with their online services.
Apple has done a wonderful job revamping .dot-mac into Mobile Me. They now provide us with 20gb of online storage and a joyous, shiny interface to use all within a web browser. Once the kinks get worked out and Mobile Me stabilizes, we should be hearing rave reviews, (If we can get past the hellish launch, that is).
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3 Comments to “Walt Mossberg; “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed To Be Reliable””
Yes, the idea of MobileMe is great. Apple’s PR for it is also great. The actual execution of it has been terrible.
But I think the biggest question mark for MobileMe is whether Apple will take it more seriously than they took supporting dotMac. dotMac was notoriously unreliable, with unplanned downtime happening on a weekly or monthly basis, not months after Apple started offering the service, but YEARS later, right up to the conversion to MobileMe. With Apple blowing off customer complaints about poor performance accessing dotMac from European countries by blaming the customer’s ISP [yes, evidently everyone's ISP in Europe is terrible].
The only other SaaS that I’m aware of with a worse record for uptime is Twitter.
Seriously, a company with a market capitalization of about $150 BILLION dollars, with more than $10 BILLION available in cash/short term assets, should be able to provide a service to what, a few hundred thousand users, that doesn’t go down every couple of weeks.
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I couldn’t agree more with you. One would think that with the resources and influences that Apple has, not to mention the years of practice with .mac, you’d think that they be able to get this one right. Not exactly the smooth transition we were hoping for. Actually not even close…I hope this is not going to be indicative of future problems with MobileMe, seeing the great potential that it has.
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Someone in Cupertino is learning a whole new vocabulary right now, with words I can’t spell in this alphabet. I empathize. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly challenging behind MobileMe’s technology, so I’m sure it is just a problem with servers and capacity. It is getting better. I had a problem with it that I solved by slapping myself on the forehead, then signing out and back in on both my computers.
If you capitalize the L, it looks like it rhymes with Darlene, as in “Hey, MobiLeme, where’s my beer?”
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