Apple continued to scramble over the weekend to limit the damage caused by MobileMe, the company's first step into cloud computing, by creating a status page on the Apple website and publicly acknowledging that the new service was still not problem-free.Intended to succeed the company's aging .Mac web service, MobileMe was launched on the 9th of July to a troublesome start, initially being taken offline and restored several times, leaving existing customers stranded until it went live to stay at midday on the 11th of July. Since then, the service has been plagued by troubles.
Apple's first apology came after claiming MobileMe would immediately update calendars and contacts, with instant syncing between online, offline and mobile devices, which as it turned out could take as long as 15 minutes. Apple sent an e-mail to its many disgruntled customers, blaming the error on excitement over the service.
It then transpired that some European and Australian customers who signed up for a free month-long trial of the service had inadvertently had £121 taken from their credit cards as an authorisation hold, rather than the USD $1 that was expected. Apple offered the affected customers an extension of the free trial to four months and promised to have the authorisation holds removed as soon as possible.
Users have also experienced problems synching calendars, Microsoft Outlook users in particular are reporting that appointments vanish or appear in specific modes only. Additionally, according to Apple, when used with an Exchange Server, Exchange-based calendars and contact lists will not synchronise by design, and as such is not a bug that will be fixed.
Additionally, popular news site The Register has reported that 1% of MobileMe users may have permanently lost e-mail messages sent to them between the 18th and 22nd of July, after a serious server problem blocked around one in 100 members from accessing their mail accounts.
The service was hoped to make Apple a player in the online portal world currently dominated by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, but so far it has served only to bruise Apple's reputation for producing reliable software. Apple has already offered its customers an additional month free for the $99 annual service.
Critics have pointed out that perhaps Apple had bitten off more that it could chew when it shipped a second-generation iPhone, updated six million existed iPhone customers with new software and launched MobileMe all within the space of 24 hours. Perhaps a better strategy would have been to initially launch the service in beta format in order to let the company comfortably patch the more than 70 bugs it has currently acknowledged in just over two weeks.
In any case it is likely that the ongoing development of MobileMe will be watched closely by critics, competitors and its reported 2 million user base alike.
