Will MobileMe save .Mac?
Apple’s rollout of their new “cloud” service, MobileMe has finally, after a very shaky start delivered a much needed upgrade to .Mac. New features include 20 gigs of online storage (up from a measly 10), “push” email, contacts and calendar to all devices from iPhone/iPod Touch through your Macs to the web, and online applications allowing the editing of your mail, contacts and calendars through your web browser. New new “@me.com” email address sweetens the deal for some, and the price in Ireland has fallen slightly to a more realistic, but still high €79. The tight integration with iWeb for publishing makes it an attractive way to host sites, and iDisk seems a lot quicker. I like MobileMe, but I think it is, unfortunately, destined to fail unless Apple make it a bundled service with iLife or even the OS, and here’s a few reasons why.
1 - It’s a terrible name.
It sucks, doesn’t it? Particularly for an Apple product. They really should’ve cashed in on some iHype with an iName for this service. What are they thinking? And as for the logo. It’s almost Microsoft-esque in its rubbishness.
2 – It’s too expensive
€79 for a bunch of services you can essentially get for free if you look hard enough (google.com, box.net etc). OK, the integration with Apple products is neat, and the so called “push” technology is pretty cool (though really, what’s wrong with a regular sync?), but I can live without these.
3 – People won’t use the email address…
…because they don’t want to have to pay €79 each year just to keep their email address! At least give the mail service for free! Then it’s advertising the service every time someone sends a mail. Come on Apple! Get a grip!
4 – iWeb integration seems great at first, but…
… you soon run into some problems. There’s no easy way to track your hits for example (without using 3rd party stuff). Also, adding metatags is, well, I’m not sure it’s impossible, but it’s not easy, which means you can’t really do proper SEO. And then there’s the ONE domain name you can use with it. So you can make as many sites as you want in iWeb, but you can only use one domain name? And you pay over €150 for this privilege, as you need iWeb ‘08 and MobileMe to do all this, which leads me to the last point.
5 – To get the best out of it, you’ve to buy iLife, and Leopard as well
So, you’re, like, €250 down or whatever, before you’ve even started doing anything. And then there’s the OS upgrade on yor iPhone/iPod Touch too. Apple seem to want to have their cake and eat it on this one a bit too much
It’s an awful shame, as we know it’s been a hair-thinning project for Apple, and without much thanks as it was mostly overshadowed by the iPhone 3G thing (apart of course from when it all went horribly wrong at the beginning). But unless Apple realise that this is service best bundled with the OS or iLife, albeit at slightly higher prices for these things, and until they solve some of the other fundamental issues, not many are going to buy it. And I, for one, am very disappointed about that, as I think there’s a lot of good things about the service.
If you need proof that MobileMe is destined to fail, here it is. I have a MobileMe family account, which gives me 5 user accounts. I pretty much can’t give away the other accounts. Well, in truth, I have given them away, but the people who have them don’t use them, or just give out about the service all the time. I keep telling them it’s my money they are giving out about, but they still moan. I guess we all need to moan from time to time, eh?