2008 MobileMe

After 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, and later updated it as .Mac in 2002. It was renamed MobileMe in 2008, but the switch was plagued with issues. Users couldn’t sign in to the system, and some inadvertently got charged the subscription fee 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, before being replaced by the massively more successful iCloud service in 2011.