@Apple - MobileMe desperately needs to suck less

I find hard to understand how a company that makes FaceTime, Retina display and iPhone 4’s design can bare providing such an anachronism as Mobile Me – in terms of functionality, interoperability, interface, structure – you name it. In 2010.

Actually, “me.com” is nothing more than a simple (remote) backup and storage tool that lacks ergonomics and costs premium.

I must admit I don’t know Mobile Me dev history, but I bet no one cares about its past evolution. What it is, what it does and how slick it works are the questions a 25 year male would ask. Never “Is it better than yesterday? I’m just asking ‘cause I never looked at it before, anyway”…

Strike 1

I love the “it just works” idea; it’s not new but it’s more meaningful in the hands of a highly self-esteemed company.

Still, the limitations of “it just works” are obvious: sometimes we need much more from a service or a device than to just work. We sometimes need it to work extremely well and precise, not because we’re picky, but because these attributes should be the real nature of that specific service or device.

What I’m saying is you will never admit an association between Johnny Walker’s “keep walking” and a 100 meters speed race. Johnny Walker will never be able to sponsor a speed race!

Another example of a situation where the customer expects much, much more from something than to just work is mechanical watches: it’s simply not enough for them to just work! They need to work as accurate and precise your money can buy.

And Mobile Me costs a lot more than other similar services and does less than your money can buy. Syncing is a mess, the GUI is lazy as hell, the Mobile Me apps – iDisk and Gallery – suck big time. No need for details.

Strike 2
I’ve seen this before and it was a sign of rotten business core.

Nokia

They’ve built Symbian touch; we all know how awfully it performed, without the need of comparison to Apple or Android. It was dreadful.

One big fail was kinetic scrolling. They absolutely fail to cope with this requirement.
I don’t really know what was Nokia’s explanation of this limitation.

All of a sudden, there came “Gravity”: a Symbian twitter client (the best one), showing off powerful and scalable kinetic scrolling. @Janole proved with his application Symbian was able to support the feature.

Almost instantaneously every blogger, user, customer, Nokia lover or hater started shouting: “Here’s your kinetic scrolling, Nokia! Buy this guy, hire him, steal from him, just use his APIs and build them into your OS!”

Nothing happened. For a long time (maybe even today) Gravity remained the sole Symbian application supporting kinetic scrolling (the browser was an exception, but that’s a Nokia’s bad as long as they were not able to port the function).

I don’t know why Nokia behaved like this, but the answer came quick after this old story: Nokia was losing its mojo.

Now back to Mobile Me.

@Apple: do you see Dropbox? Do you see Readdle Docs? Do you see Netflix? That’s what Mobile Me should have been. That’d be the moment I’d be glad to pay 99 bucks a year.

Now I’m paying this money but I’m very unhappy with this product. I sincerely think it sucks.