MobileMe

A fter talking about iWeb, we feel MobileMe deserves a

mention here too. It was the service that morphed into iCloud, but its launch in 2008 was a disaster.

Apple released a suite of internet services called iTools in 2000, later updating it to .Mac in 2002. It was renamed MobileMe in 2008, but the switch was plagued with issues. Users couldn’t log in to the new system, and some inadvertently got charged the subscription fees during their free trial. And although users could originally sync their Microsoft Outlook accounts with MobileMe, this was then removed only a short while after launch, leaving many people in the lurch.

Even Steve Jobs admitted, albeit in an internal company email, that launching MobileMe at the same time as the iPhone 3G and the App Store was a mistake, saying it was done too hurriedly and was “not up to Apple’s standards”. Its time was up – MobileMe lasted just three years, being replaced by iCloud in 2011.