AppleInsider StaffAfter MobileMe launched and received a poor review from The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, Jobs assembled the team that created the service and scolded them, according to a new profile in the latest issue Fortune, summarized by Business Insider. The meeting took place at the auditorium on Apple's campus that the company uses to do product demonstrations for the press.
Jobs reportedly asked the MobileMe team what the new product was supposed to do. When an employee told Jobs what the purpose of MobileMe was, the CEO reportedly responded: "So why the f— - doesn't it do that?"
"You've tarnished Apple's reputation..." Jobs reportedly said. "You should hate each other for having let each other down... Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us."
Following the meeting, Jobs is said to have named a new executive to be in charge of the MobileMe service. Author Adam Lashinsky at Fortune also reported that most of the team that built the original service was disbanded.
The MobileMe "push" service was introduced in June 2009 as a successor to .Mac, with Web-based applications including mail, contacts and calendar. But MobileMe got off to a rocky start, and Apple apologized and offered a free 30-day subscription after a multitude of problems occurred.
Now, in 2011, Apple is believed to be on the verge of introducing a successor to MobileMe, potentially named "iCloud." Last month, AppleInsider exclusively reported that the soon-to-debut Internet cloud service will offer music streaming and enhanced sync capabilities between connected devices.
Bon Adamson
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117 Comments
That 'revamp' of MobileMe was lipstick on a pig. I hope that whatever is coming will make us go 'wow,' like the iPhone did at launch.
I am at a critical decision stage for my cloud needs. Make it 'magical,' Steve and team.
I'm a big fan of Apple and have been a MobileMe user since the iTools, .Mac days. But I agree, this has not been a very well realized product from Apple. The only reason I use it is for the email integration and the contact management syncing with my iPhone 4.
I never use the MobileMe homepage or photo sharing. I think those have been overshadowed or even replaced by facebook. I use DropBox over iDisk. iDisk is atrociously slow.
I wonder if Steve Jobs knows about the iPhoto roll out. I never did get all my photos recovered.
I'm a big fan of Apple and have been a MobileMe user since the iTools, .Mac days. But I agree, this has not been a very well realized product from Apple. The only reason I use it is for the email integration and the contact management syncing with my iPhone 4.
I never use the MobileMe homepage or photo sharing. I think those have been overshadowed or even replaced by facebook. I use DropBox over iDisk. iDisk is atrociously slow.
Totally, Apple hopefully either has something better than Dropbox planned or should have bought Dropbox as their networked file solution. It's so much better than iDisk.
Not to mention random issues with keychain sync that finally had me turn it off - corrupting the keychain and then propagating that across multiple machines turned out to be worse than just syncing a certificate now and then manually.
Anyway, hopefully they have something cool coming, there's certainly been a long enough gap in real updates that might mean they had time to do a complete rework of it all.
I wonder if Steve Jobs knows about the iPhoto roll out. I never did get all my photos recovered.
Luckily you had them all backed up, right?
Right???