Steve Jobs slammed MobileMe but it wasn't that bad

Agree with you. I find MobileMe's sync services to be a whole lot better than Google's..

And all these years I thought I was the only one who has had a great MobileMe experience. If only I could have gotten dang tasks to sync with my iPhone it would have been great. To that end I'm excited about iCloud.

I guess it was a bad start that was hard to recover from. But apart from it being a little slow, I very much like it for miscellaneous document storage and hosting a couple of simple websites.

You have to wonder that if Steve was willing to belittle MobileMe in public like that what was he like behind closed doors!!

It was a failure in the sense that it failed to be as successful as apple's other products.

I recall reading a story about Jobs and the mobileme team meeting after the release of mobile me. He basically removed the team lead on the spot because of the failure. Mossberg who is generally a Mac guy was slamming mobileme in his articles and people were not flocking to the service.

I don't think the syncing services were terrible, but I do think the email service was unstable in the beginning with numerous outages. iDisk was and is pathetically slow, compare that against iDisk. iCal never really caught on and they had to update that to make it a bit better. The cost was 99 bucks which was much higher then competitors (free). Finally this is a personal preference. I think @mac sounds better then @me and so I believe some people were put off the @me email addr

Overall it was not a rousing success and it had a lot of rough edges when they rolled it out.

MobileMe screwed up on me several times. For that reason, I'd call it a failure, as the rest of my Apple products have never messed up so bad.

When it worked however, it was fine. Apart from iDisk, which was the slowest thing ever.

benhollberg said:

During the Worldwide Developers Conference Steve Jobs seemed to really hate on MobileMe and pretty much called it a failure. While this is probably not what he really thinks that is just what he said.

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I hope that that is exactly what he thinks. I mean even Jobs couldn't pretend it was a good piece of work.
Poorly executed and overpriced.
iDisk? I have not once _ever_ been able to make full use of it. Slow as molasses in January on a good day. Syncing problems. Password keychain errors…

benhollberg said:

As a MobileMe user from the beginning … am just curious, does anybody else really think that MobileMe was that much of a failure because I don't think so.

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I got my @mac.com way back with iTools… which then became .Mac and then MobileMe.

It stunk in varying degrees through my nearly a decade's use of it.
I like my @mac.com address.
Only thing that keeps/kept me shelling out every year…

Other than a few hiccups at the beginning (which didn't impact any of my data, just accessibility), I've been more than happy with both .Mac and MobileMe. Only thing that really bothered me was that my subscribed calendars would sync via MM, but I couldn't view them via the website.

You have to understand that Apple is a business and branding is very important. There were initial problems that were bad for the branding and even though the service was quite good after the first few months, it was never able to shake the reputation it got from the problems early on. First impressions are important.

So instead, Apple just rebranded the major parts to iCloud, added some very nice new features and functionality, and made it free. If they just kept the MobileMe branding, the new offerings wouldn't get a fair shake.