People are upset because they pay $100 for services they could get for free other places. They paid $100 to get this stuff with reliability and ease, instead a lot more than it should have had lost and down email, something absolutely essential. People can and probably have been fired for this downtime.
Umm. that is $100 per year. Please let me know where I can get bannerless/addless web hosting, syncing between computers and a web interface for my mail and appointments, disk backups (not that I would actually put any secure data out on the web), etc from one provider all in one place for less than $100 a year. more like $20 or more a month.
if you know of such a place, that is reliable and will work with my iweb, my PC, my macs, and my sprint palm centro phone - please send me an email on this board so that I can check it out.
Also, all other companies state that you need to backup your website and they are not responsible for mis-directed or lost emails, lost websites or lost data.
yes, Apple blundered initially (still say it was the lack of hardware than a software issue for the most part); and they took a while with their explanations or apologies - but I think their intent and work afterward is right on target.
oh and Google. you have to log into a different area to see your calendar (plus I never did like the interface, I accidently created overlapping never ending, recurring appointments - AND I CAN ONLY SEE THEM ON GOOGLE.
On my Sprint phone; I have MobileMe, AOL, and Gmail. I have not published my Mobile me mail address to anyone yet - as I am waiting for all the bitching to stop (plus since I just got mobile me since the weekend of the roll out, I have thousands of email contacts on AOL I need to inform and about 100 on gmail). But - my AOL and GMAIL never sync properly on my phone. Either I delete if from the server and it still comes to my phone on the next sync, or I delete it from my phone and it still does not update the server properly. I find I have to clean up two places, on both accounts.
So in short - NOBODY, NOT EVEN GOOGLE has perfected what Apple is trying to accomplish. The only one is Microsoft, if your blackberry is tied directly to exchange (and that is over a private network). I worked at one company where they gave us all blackberries and my blackberry and my outlook at work were always in sync.
Apple is the first one who said - hey, lets give an exchange server type to the general masses. and then took on rolling it out to the 1000's of existing .mac users and new iphone adopters. A larger roll out than any company who ever switched email servers/services - and I have yet to see any company with a smaller number have a 100% success rate (well, unless you only have 4 employees and here in the USA, it is become a trend where the average larger company has fewer than 1000 full time employees.
Yes it was rocky, but I think this is the sweetest non-microsoft for the private user since apple pie (no pun intended). Not bad at all for a first attempt with 1000's of users on all different platforms and different devices, all over the world.
My testing with mobileme - slow at first. Once I could get into the web, anything I did there updated my mac and pc with no problem. Mail has always worked great - push on calendar and contacts was at a timed interval, but nothing I could not live with. if I needed right away, I would manually sync. PC to web - never seemed to get that end right - even with manual sync. but with all the updates on mobileme, I gave up after the first day. I may go back and try it now. once I was somewhat satisfied with my guinea pig dell, I went to my macbook and had the same experience.
All and All, my experience has been good, I was not overly effected, expected there would be some glitches - and other than the web slowness or never ending loading that occured in the first day or two. I say it has been good.