The PutPlace Blog

Looks like MobileMe is turning into a bit of a train wreck for Apple. I feared this might happen. Its a hard gig to go from zero to every Mac user in the world, even for a slick operation like Apple.

Looks like our concerns about Apple being able to scale MobileMe have some basis in fact. According to Engadget,

Apple’s Push-like MobileMe
launch has been such a debacle that they’re now in damage control mode.
As a result, some poor soul has been tasked by Steve Jobs to post
status updates “every other day or so.” The first update is already
revealing:

• Last Friday, 1% of MobileMe subscribers were affected by a “serious problem” with one of Apple’s mail server.
• Limited web access has been restored to those accounts but full access won’t be sorted until next week.
• Of these 1%, Apple admits to losing “approximately 10%” of the messages received between July 16 and July 18.

For the rest of you MobileMe subscribers, Apple has added server
capacity, tuned the software to scale better, and fixed over 70 bugs to
date. So the question is, how’s MobileMe working for you?

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.