To compete with Google, Apple has to make Mobile Me free | Hacker News Reader

To compete with Google, Apple has to make Mobile Me free

sachin.posterous.com

99 pointsa4agarwal63 comments

"In many ways, Mobile Me isn't that good! By making it free, they will gain a lot of users, and therefore gain resources from Apple to make it better."

So, to summarize: the product currently sucks. By dropping the division's revenue to zero, while simultaneously encouraging more users to see a cruddy product that (let's be honest) represents Apple in a poor light, it'll be easier to convince Apple to throw more money at the product.

I think he just successfully argued against his thesis.

They could always fix it.

Come on... It's not that hard. It's a relatively simple problem that scales horizontally very well. And it's not like Apple is short on cash.

Apple has a frustrating habit of neglecting certain products (see AppleTV).

It's quite inexplicable when seen from outside.

Unlike Mobile Me, which is a key product that partially enables one of their most profitable lines of business, Apple launched AppleTV while overtly and specifically saying that it was an expirimental business that they weren't fully commited to.

Apple views themselves as a hardware company and they'll give away software if it boosts hardware sales. iTunes is an obvious example. I could definitely imagine a scenario where Apple makes MobileMe free for iPhone users.

They should do that in my opinion. It's one of the few consumer-oriented ways to sync contacts, calendar, and email without using iTunes.

I hate iTunes. Even when I'm using my wife's Mac. It makes everything I want to do difficult. Seriously, Apple needs to learn from Valve and Steam.

Recently I picked up an Apple TV. My wife was having problems ripping movies for the kids (much safer than letting the DVDs get trashed) and then getting them to run through the media centers on one of the consoles. So, I went and got an Apple TV.

Apple TV is mostly nice, but it has it's warts. First, the syncing is horrid. I have issues syncing while Apple TV plays movies. It can't, or at least, I can't find a way to do it. So, if someone is watching something, and it needs to Sync, NOOOOO. I've had this problem with my iPod, with Sync being the harbinger of death.

Anyways. The next issue is movie files that disappear. I've synced videos, played those videos, and then the videos have disappeared, or just stopped working. Or iTunes will tell me it's synced, and it won't show up on the Apple TV.

Seriously, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others really need to start working together. The Internet works far better than any crap they've put out. Grrr... frustration, nerd rage!!!!

Sorry. =/

I love iTunes. It has all my music in a scriptable database with a wonderfully configurable front end. I've never understood the hostility that's developed over it, other than possibly sour grapes Windows users forced to use it because of their iPods. Before iTunes, I used WinAmp, which was garbage. Maybe there are better programs now, although I can't imagine what else I'd want to do that iTunes doesn't make easy for me.

80%, meet 20% :-)

I think the hate comes from Windows users who do not like using a non-native app. Who can blame them.

I too love iTunes.

I used to be a Mac user and always hated iTunes. It always felt like it was fighting me and trying to force me to do things its way rather than my way. Asking it, for example, to play music stored on a remote samba share tended to make it copy the music to my hard drive rather than, you know, play the music.

Foobar with a few ui plugins :-)

Arguably, there isn't a solid Linux solution (probably because audio dev in Linux is sisyphian.

mpd+ncmpcpp!

Windows users hate iTunes because they think it's crap.

Apple users hate Flash because they think it's crap.

Neither camp thinks their wrong.

Go figure.

It all comes down to different ways of doing things. Some people like to manage their music more manually, copying over mp3 files to a folder. I am in this category, because I like complete control, and some of the things itunes does seems to be confusing. Also, I don't see the need of having mp3 files on a hdd, then stores on my iphone, then also stored in the itunes music folder. I don't need 3 copies of a music file. This is one part that frustrates me. Another frustration was silence between tracks, which itunes did not used to support.

However, I completely understand why most poeple like itunes, because most people aren't like this, and itunes provides a very simple interface for them to do it.

Saying that, the Windows version of itunes has not been as good as the mac version. And even on the mac, it seems to pause when copying over lots of large mp3 tracks, although this has gotten a lot better in the recent release.

iTunes is a poor media manager, mostly because it's focused on become a DRM System. Just think about what it really does, what it really syncs. iTunes handles applications, of all things. If you remain with Apple's ecosystem, everything will be fine. Go outside that, and everything starts to break down.

Being forced to use software on one electronic device to control another electronic device is inane regardless whether it's a PC or Mac.

I can accept that iTunes is not the greatest software written. Being forced to use iTunes, with no other options, sucks ass.

"In many ways, Mobile Me isn't that good" - hence Apple will gain nothing from making a bad product free. Their captive audience right now are Mac users, and it's a far easier sell.

Certain aspects of Mobile Me need work, like iDisk. Other aspects work well, like email and Mobile Me sync.

I'm saying that Apple should make Mobile Me free, and put more resources behind it to make it better. They should focus on increasing its adoption, and making it a core piece of their mobile platform.

As opposed to trying to monetize from it directly.

Yes, we understand that, but what you wrote makes no sense.

He didn't argue against his thesis. When economies of scale are that of Apple's, it can make sense for a partiular devision to lose money if it inreases the bottom line overall for the company. I could see an Apple cloud increasing the likelihood that people will buy more Apple hardware if it just syncs up when you plug it in. Lets face it, setting up the Google cloud on the iPhone with Google Sync isn't something that your non-techie can pull off easily.

Thinking in terms of profit per division for companies the size of Apple, while prudent, isn't looking at the big picture.

Organizationally it is a mindshare problem. Every successful tech company faces this. Windows Mobile was always the 'little brother' of Windows and Office, and could never get the kind of resources and talent needed to win in that space. Google Reader is arguably an example of such a team at Google. Mobile Me is a little brother to Mobile / Mac sales.

If your users expand to the full set of all iPhone and Mac users... then your mindshare and resources internally expand. And you can finally improve the product.

The author apparently has too short a memory to recall when .mac was called "iTools", and it was free. It turned out to be a much larger money pit than they anticipated, one that was only ever going to be viable by violating their users' trust and selling their privacy away.

I'm of the opinion that Apple made the right choice in keeping their brand clean from all the privacy issues with those free ad-supported services, opting instead for classical b2c relationships (service to client in exchange for money) with the implied privacy protection of typically confidential business to customer relationships.

The author [also] makes the repeated mistake of assuming cloud services are better than the obviously obsolete trail of tears that is syncing to a computer. What if my personal and relationship data is valuable to me, and I don't want to have to upload it to ANYONE WHATSOEVER? What if I want to be able to transfer it directly to another device I own without having it reside on a third party device? That's worth money to me, and that's what I'm paying Apple for.

[edit]Made it slightly more clear that I'm talking about two different topics, .mac and syncing of data from iPhones and iPads.[/edit]

This argument doesn't seem to make much sense, as MobileMe does store all of your information on a cloud service on machine's not owned or operated by you.

Sorry, my argument could have been made more clearly. I was talking about two different topics, .mac and syncing of iDevices with computers, and I didn't do a good job of separating them.

For .Mac, the fact that the service is paid and not ad-supported means that I don't have the awkward situation of my vendor being incentivized to sift through all my information with a fine comb in order to sell me their partners' products.

For syncing of iDevices, the fact that the data goes directly from the device to my computer is much more acceptable than having to make everything pass through Google's servers.

I'm much more comfortable with both of these situations than their equivalents on Google's platform.

It seems like Apple could retain these benefits by including a MobileMe subscription with every iDevice, but not making it outright "free". Once 90% of iCustomers have MobileMe accounts, Apple would be motivated to improve it and add more Google-like cloud syncing.

I'd like to see them split up the various features of .me, and allow you to buy only the ones you want, similar to what they're doing with iWork on the iPad. I'd buy email for $20-25/yr, maybe idisk for another $20, and Find My Phone for [$5 per incident or $15/yr] (which I'd hopefully never have to buy, but would be more than happy to fork over for should the need arise). The rest of the stuff, they can keep.

[edit]Changed suggested price of Find My Phone from $10/incident before someone had replied to it, but then I noticed my edit made his reply not make sense, hence this note.[/edit]

I use Find my iPhone all the time; not just when I've left my phone at the diner (I never have), but when I can't find my phone in my apartment also. A roommate once used it to find her phone, which turned out to be in the fridge for some reason.

You could just call your iphone, that would have the same effect if it was in your apartment.

Not if it's muted, which mine is 90% of the time.

I don't use an Android phone, but I am a user of MobileMe. What are the benefits of the Google system that you don't get from MobileMe?

As an aside, I have to say that I can't imagine using an iPhone without MobileMe - it would lose a lot of its appeal for me!

"To compete with Fox, Time Warner has to make HBO free."

On the contrary, these products have different business models that intentionally appeal to different markets.

For example, you can't walk into a Google Store at the mall and have someone help you get your Windows 7 laptop and iPhone talking to each other.

Also, if you offer people free coffee versus coffee marked down to a dollar from five dollars, many people will choose the coffee for a buck.

People like to value things, and having paid for something invests them in valuing its utility.

Rumor has it that the Mobile Me product and infrastructure as it currently stands is going into maintenance mode. I doubt Apple would give up entirely on something so important, so my best guess is that they are going to launch something entirely new that does many of the same things in a better way.

This is hearsay, so please treat it as such.

Maybe this has something to do with their big new data center being built in North Carolina: http://www.cultofmac.com/interview-apples-gigantic-new-data-...

What Apple needs, and I imagine this is what it is working towards, is a way to make its gadget products (iPhone, iPad)"unethered" from a computer. In other words, you should be able to have an iPhone or an iPad and no computer. This is not currently the case. So I assume they are coming with some kind of cloud service that allows you to manage your backups, store the primary version of your information etc. directly from your device.

I don't feel it needs to be free, but the service certainly does not feel like it's worth $100/year (or even the $69/year it costs if you buy a MobileMe activation code on Amazon rather than direct from Apple).

But that's because I'm paying for stuff I don't use. I only subscribed for the "Find my iPhone" service and the contact/calendar sync. I don't use the cloud storage features and I already have half a dozen other email addresses I don't check anyway. If not for "find my iPhone," I would've just relied entirely on Google's sync service.

I don't see why they can't implement a pricing system that unbundles some of the services -- sell "find my iPhone," the sync services, the remote access, and cloud storage services a la carte.

A big selling point for their stuff is the integration with iLife -- it's really easy to publish from one of those apps to the web.

Although I think the cloud is very important in making a great end-to-end mobile product, I think this would be a red herring for Apple. Here's why:

Apple appeals to a limited range of people. There are many people who simply don't identify themselves as being a potential iPhone owner, regardless of superiority, design, range of apps, etc. I would be extremely surprised if most consumers had any idea of what cloud syncing meant or why it would benefit them, let alone have it be a deciding factor in their cell phone purchase. Sure such a feature can be explained, but most users don't even work at that level yet where they need such deep syncing.

What Android phones are offering is choice in identity: tons of different types of phones they can choose from on carriers they are already on (a big deal when you consider family plans), with a big range of prices. These phones run the gamut from the low to the high end of the market.

This is the antithesis of what Apple is all about. It is likely that Apple has always known this would happen, and once things settle down, Apple will position itself comfortably in the high-end smartphone market and pull in higher than normal profits.

I know a lot of people love free but I'm a big fain of paying for my email accounts and data hosting. I believe in that "you get what you pay for" saying.

Mobile Me however is one of the things I'm finding isn't worth it right now because it doesn't support bringing one's own domain to it. I mean, I love iPhone sync and stuff, but not being able to bring my own domain to it is really crap, as is the speed of iDisk when you're not in the US.

And one more thing that makes Mobile Me effing annoying. If you want to import mail from Gmail, via POP (let's say you're lazy and don't want to download local then upload via IMAP) you can't.

Because a company so "security conscious" as Apple only allows cleartext POP3 on port 110. No port 995, no SSL, and the support staff tells you they are unaware of how to migrate email from Gmail and that they support all standard POP hosts.

I'm sorry, but when I read that in the support chat interface, I was this close to start cursing but I realized it wasn't the guy's fault that company policy in this regard is crap.

POP doesn't work well when you have multiple limited-bandwidth clients accessing the same mailbox. I'm surprised they took the effort to make it work at all.

This article is a confusing mix of three unrelated arguments: that MobileMe should be better, that MobileMe should be free, and that iPhone OS devices should be first-class computing devices.

I really don't see what any of them have to do with one another.

I recently purchased a subscription to Mobile Me. I was sick and tired of Google's offerings not synching correctly, or completely losing my data. I have not had this problem since switching (mind you, I've only been a member for one month).

To make Mobile Me free, Apple has to improve it.

They don't want 100x the users until it's ready.

For me, the problem of MobileMe's pricing isn't that it costs $100/yr. It's the fact that if I don't want to use the service anymore, everyone who has that email address will need to get my new address. With free services that offer email forwarding (Gmail comes to mind), this isn't an issue at all. Once you get a MobileMe email address, it's tough to get out of that mess.

With Google's Sync service, I get half of the MobileMe benefits (push contacts and calendars) for free. And I can move from it if I'd like. There's no lock-in. Then to replace iDisk, there's Dropbox, with a much better merge-handling system.

The only MobileMe feature missing from these services is Find my iPhone.

I still think Find my iPhone should be something supported by my monthly contract with AT&T.

It's something that all carriers could offer for a few dollars a month, regardless of phone.

There is the issue of expertise, to scale this fast into a system that ambitious would be something that apple didn't tackle before. Apple talent poll seems to be focused on other problems, very large scale computing is an expertise Google completely dominates at present and is closely aligned with their core business.

this isn't resolved by throwing money at it, its a whole other class of engineering problems, and the talent is currently elsewhere, much of at the rivals employ.

you mean like cell phones and telecom?

I think free mobileme and itunes/app sync is coming. Remember that large data center Apple just built?

I've been a mac user for decades but have never used the current mobileme as it just seemed meh, for the money. I sync calendars over google calendar and use drop box and mail attachments for files.

If it was free and beefed up I'd try it and it may just become another Apple sticky.

I think the entire suite of online synchronization that Google provides online to the droids as the rival to mobile.me not just itunes sync.

Google provides mapping services, increasingly important to geolocation services, email, document creation, address book management, not to mention Google voice which is seamless on its phones.

Apple has a great phone, and of course the ipad, but a great number of the users use Google services of which the droid enjoys an extremely fast pace of integration. This leaves Apple in a strange position, where its own clients rely by the millions on its chief rival technology.

Droid can and will enjoy a very fast adaptation to the cloud, and apple doesn't have that scale capability, and to scale to a place that can rival Google in web services will be quite a feat, and a change of focus for Apple.

http://counternotions.com/2010/05/25/mapwars/

This is as untrue now as it was the first time it was said. MobileMe does not need to be free. MobileMe just needs to become indispensable. It needs to suck less and be so integrated into all Apple products that not having it is simple not an option. Making it free would be great and would certainly dent Google, but doing the above will also have a deleterious effect on their rival.

I figure Apple's central cloud-computing strategy is not to offer cool services for free, but rather to make tons of money. To do this: sell tons of iPods and iPhones and iPads, the enabling devices. Sort of like Cisco selling hardware during the initial internet boom, and getting incredibly rich, while others experimented with silly dotcoms etc.

I remember when Jobs promised my @mac.com e-mail to be free. And I am still a Mac user (last time I counted, I had 9 Macs in my collection, one of which is used regularly to sync my iPod)

A user can buy an Android phone, log in with their Google account, and instantly have their contacts, email, and calendar.

Fortunately, this can also be done with an iPhone. :)

Great comment by the author on making the Apple experience stickier - more difficult to buy hardware from another vendor that won't play with Mobile Me.

Too late.

Or, ya know, they could just allow 3rd party MobileMe clone services to be configured. That thing called "competition"? Buuuut, this is Apple, so we shouldn't really expect it.

... you mean like letting people install dropbox and configure gmail?

Tell me I'm lost in the sarchasm.

No, it's entirely different actually. A lot of applications hook into MobileMe to allow syncing, and don't offer any alternatives.

Address Book, for example, plugs right in. Sure, it's got Yahoo and Google syncing... but they break routinely, and I had to fight with it to not delete everything on both ends when I first hooked them up. I'm now using Soocial to sync them because it was so buggy, and none of the options pass images back and forth. Unless I'm forgetting something, MobileMe does, and it preserves all data correctly, unlike any option I've found.

I believe iWeb also hooks in, letting you make changes to your site and push them out quickly. As do iPhoto, iMovie, etc etc. And when was the last time you could find your iPhone and / or wipe it if it was stolen with a 3rd party tool?

Prior to Dropbox, what easy option was there aside from MobileMe? And remember that all this happens behind the scenes, so you can't throw up dialog boxes ever, and still handle everything.

There's nothing comparable because there essentially can't be unless they allowed you to change what MobileMe server you connect to. And show me something that handles everything MobileMe does, in one site with minimal / built-in setup on a Mac, and I'll accept that Gmail in Mail.app is the same thing (when you can't specify which folders you subscribe to).

---

I'm not claiming MobileMe is worth the money (it's not, IMO). Nor that you can't simulate it with an amalgam of other systems which don't necessarily play nicely together. But how many average-users do you think do that, vs how many would use a 3rd party option if all they had to do was change one text field (ie, mobileme.apple.com => mobileme.anothersite.com)? It's entirely within Apple's ability to present that field.

edit: find me a (single) service that gives you this (see the gallery), and try convincing people to switch: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/me-dot-com.html

For Keynote, http://280slides.com/.

Pretty impressive, but webapp != synchronization in desktop app. Especially when it's pretty far from a complete clone, however close the UI looks.

I think MobileMe uses ActiveSync. They were both introduced at the same time. They both have the same exact features.

Anyone running Exchange or an ActiveSync licensee (such as Zimbra) can also support the same features.

It uses SyncML. And you can't simulate it, because hostnames are hardcoded and you'd have a problem getting SSL cert for domain you don't own.

MobileMe uses XMPP for push.

But true, anyone with Exchange or ActiveSync can support the same features on an iPhone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com