Comments on: Walt Mossberg; “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed To Be Reliable”

By: Harvey

Harvey — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:17:03 +0000

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?”

By: trenttheIV

trenttheIV — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:05:50 +0000

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.

By: dave

dave — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:43:19 +0000

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.