Ouch, Those MobileMe Reviews

You pay for a bundle of services that you could get separately free? Wow! I have free e-mail, and contacts (thank you gmail), a free calendar, and free storage space (thank you box).

Besides lousy customer service, what exactly are you paying for?

Wow, Bevo, feeling snarky today, are we?

Apple's .Mac service has always been good. I have had it since it was free. I've used it for over a year now to keep two Macs synchronized as to not just settings, email, and bookmarks, but I keep ALL my documents there too, safe in the cloud, as well as backed up on a separate disk.

My email has never been down for more than a couple of hours, and I can access those documents on any computer, anywhere. Safely, securely.

So they've has some hiccups. They are expanding their offering from a few hundred thousand, at the most, to over a million users, all within a short time frame.

Ever done that? Do you know what that entails? Didn't think so.

Everybody makes mistakes, and Apple has not had to deal with numbers this large all at one time before. It is, I am sure, a learning experience. Plus, to have a server fail during a large upscale operation like this is just the disaster you NEVER want to have happen!

That said, for 99% of us, the service is now up and operational, keeping my two Macs synchronized, plus pushing email & other changes to my iPhone instantly, and has been since day two!!!

What's pathetic is that for $99 a year, except for iPhone sync, MobileMe gives us only a fraction of the features we get from FREE services like gmail, yahoo mail, and hotmail. Can you use your own domain NO, do we have any type of email filtering NO, can I use a different outbound email address NO, sharing of calendars…don’t even think about it. The list goes on and on. It's like these guys never heard of gmail, yahoo mail, or hotmail. Apple...eat some humble cake and take a lesson...get out your pen and paper, setup test accounts at gmail, yahoo mail and hotmail, make a list of all the great features offered by those free email services and at least give us that feature set as a baseline.

Apple really fouled up the overall design/deployment of MobileMe with crashing/locking up servers, thousands of email accounts corrupted, incredibly slow response times, etc. It's like a bunch of kids with no mission critical software deployment experience got together and said let’s make a really cool email server/system. We will be the “Exchange for the rest of us” since we think Microsoft are just a bunch of boneheads as our senior executives make snide comments calling Microsoft’s ActiveSync ActiveStink (oops sorry was that a slip of the tongue hehe)… we will show them how cool and smart we are. Well Apple, looks like you too messed it up big time, should we call your service MobileStink or would that be rude?

I want MobileMe to be a great service, I LOVE the concept and I’m happy to pay for it, but please Apple, don’t be a bunch of arrogant brats and give us less that we can get from all the free email providers. 

Sean, thank you for putting it so brilliantly. i completely agree with you. i think the idea behind MobleMe is smart. ActiveSync for the rest of us. great idea. unfortunatly, gmail has most of the services and some of the other ones for free. i hope the second round of MobileMe will be better

The problem with yahoo mail and the rest is that you have to go online to view the stuff instead of just opening the calendar on the iPhone and viewing the changes. I like that my wife can edit my calendar and contacts on her computer and the updates appear on my phone. Yahoo doesn't do that.

A hosted Kerio solution is as close to perfect as we have found for keeping our business in sync! We used InfTek Hosting for over a year until we migrated to an in-house Kerio MailServer.

Inftek support is awesome and the price is very hard to beat!

http://www.inftekhosting.com/groupware.html