MobileMe to iCloud, just a strategic move to shift perception?

[Jsingh]

Watching the keynote as the first iCloud apps were being presented by Steve...I was thinking, "this is how it's done right now! Whats new?" A lot of the services such as address book, mail, photos, and Calendar are similar in usage and functionality but are presented as being "stored in the cloud." I just saw that aliases will be available just as before.

I really hope this move is a sort of strategic "re-branding" for MobileMe to shake the bad press and negativity surrounding the service and ultimately we will gain similar functionality through iCloud.com. The admittance that it was "not their finest hour" and the emphasis that mobileme "ceases to exist" seems to be a strategic move to shift perception about the service...also helped by the fact that it's free now.

I'm thinking that instead of just changing over to a full-fledged free version of MobileMe and throwing up a huge middle finger to us long time paid users...they decided to go this route. What do you think?

 

[iZac]

Yeah, the first few 'features' are exactly how it works with MobileMe, so it seemed at first just a plain re-branding (again) but used that as a starting point to show how it's developed into a fuller featured service.

The things that worry me are the trimming (or apparent trimming of disk space and gallery features). But the price of free is fantastic for users.

The mentioning of 5 gig space sounds like a user manageable "disk" so we can hope that iDisk lives on and by extension, so may the gallery feature (which is one of MobileMe's best). I would hope that MobileMe users just get shifted over to some sort of "custom" iCloud with more disk space? I could imagine that on June 20th 2012 all iCloud customers get upgraded to 20 gig along with the legacy MobileMe users.

But with all this syncing among various devices, iOS is CRYING out for a user system.

Perhaps iOS6…