MobileMe not up to Apple's standards: Steve Jobs

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 08 August 2008, 19:30 IST
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MobileMe, a subscription-based collection of online services and software of Apple, has been facing problems since it launched. As the company?s reaction to this, Ars Technica, the Apple-centric website received a memo from Apple CEO Steve Jobs to Apple employees. In the e-mail, he stated, "The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour." He considers MobileMe as a product "not up to Apple?s standards. We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love." Followed by the email, Jobs has given charge of MobileMe to Eddy Cue, the executive who heads iTunes, as a result of the shakeup over the synchronization service's public problems since its launch last month. Previously, MobileMe had been led by Rob Schoeben, Apple's Vice President of applications marketing who was in charge of the Mac, as well as some of its biggest applications, including iLife, iWork and Aperture. Now Eddy Cue will be the new Vice President, Internet Services and he will have to report directly to Steve Jobs. MobileMe is a service for $100 a year that would bring corporate-type synchronization of email, calendars and contacts to anyone. It is also to work on Windows computers as well as on the company's own Macintosh computers, iPhones and iPod Touch hand-helds. It has 20 gigabytes of online storage, a suite of Web-based applications, the ability to synchronize browser bookmarks and an online photo gallery. According to Jobs, it had been better to launch MobileMe as an over-the-air syncing with iPhone, rather than a monolithic service. He also admits that it was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store.