MobileMe - Looks good, but pricey!
Apple announced MobileMe (hosted at me.com which cost them a reputed 11m dollars) at their recent World Wide Developers Conference, aka WWDC for those in the know. The full details are now available on the Apple.com website.
So what is MobileMe? Well its contacts, email and calendar synchronization all wrapped up in a Nice big Apple bow and priced at $99 dollars a year. They also lob in a fancy schmancy Web 2.0 AJAX interface to email, contacts and calendar (take that Google!) and 20GB of virtual storage “in the cloud” as they are fond of saying.
Its clear they are gunning for the Outlook/Exchange users, they even pitch it as Exchange for the rest of us. Do most Outlook users know what Exchange is? I guess this is the WWDC.
So our takeaway is being Apple its sure to be as a slick as a race car, but the price tag makes Google Mail and Google Calendar look pretty attractive. I guess a lot of the CrackBerry addicts will swoon while their companies pick up the price tag.
But this is a new departure for Apple, they don’t have a lot of experience building web scale services and you can be sure that the Mac users will sign up in droves. Google can always throw their hands up and say its free when gmail glitches, but when you are stiffing your users for 99 bucks a year taking out North America’s email plonks you right in the center of class action territory. I do love the fact that they are socialising pay to play services as that is certainly our business model here at PutPlace.
I’ve signed up for the launch and look forward to giving it a spin for real. Time to buy that iPhone I’ve been lusting after.
June 12th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Apple don’t have a lot of experience with scaling web services? Are you on crack?
They’ve got one of the most successful, heavily visited web stores in the world. They used to regularly stream their keynote videos. They host dozens of movie trailers on their web site. They have apps like WebObjects which were previously the defacto web application environment for BIG COMPANIES like Nortel, Citi and the Department of Defense.
On the consumer side, they launched iTools (with email, online storage) in January 2000. They renamed it to .Mac and started to charge for it in July 2002. And now it’s me.com. It’s somewhat ironic that people would wonder if it can scale when it had 100 000 paying customers in 2002. GMail only appeared in 2004 invitation only and now is seen as the poster boy for web apps despite being open to the public since February last year.
I think they’ll scale it fine.
June 12th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Hi Matt,
100,000 users acquired over the space of how many years? Now lets double that number overnight (which would be a conservative expectation given the market investment and hype) and then double it again. I think their ability to handle that kind of growth is a reasonable question to pose.
I would be very pleased to see Apple succeed in this marketplace but the proof of the pudding….
You should also realise that streaming of videos is handled by a content distribution network (Akamai?). Also scalable email services existed long before .mac launched so this was a tried and tested technology.
Push email, calendar and contact synchronisation is a big ask and its no accident that nobody else has offered this kind of solution to date. This stuff is hard to get right and even harder at webscale numbers i.e. hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. If they succeed they will be minted, if they fail making it a “pay to play” service from the outset will cost them dearly.
Joe.
June 24th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Joe,
I’ll lean more your way on this one.
Apple do server quite a bit of traffic (from what I’ve seen) from .mac but all-u-can-eat with more functionality will be interesting 2c how they manage.
I suspect in early months not much of an issue.
If u look thru .mac forums there are some issues with occasional outages/glitches but most issues are user (learning) related.
Lal
July 15th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/11/six-million-ibricks-and-growing/