Mobile Mea Culpa (Part III)

“Not up to Apple’s standards.” That was Steve Jobs’s August assessment of the company’s MobileMe service following its travesty of a launch. Plagued by persistent mail outages and recurring data loss issues, MobileMe’s debut was, in Jobs’s own words, “not [Apple's] finest hour.” Indeed. It was among the company’s most humbling, prompting a public apology and not one, but two, free service extensions totaling 90 days.

But that’s all behind us now. In fact, it’s like it never even happened. Because Apple (AAPL), without really notifying MobileMe subscribers, has upgraded the service, apparently resolving many of the issues that had plagued it. “Apple is always working to improve MobileMe,” the company said in an article posted surreptitiously to its support site. “Since MobileMe is primarily a server-side, or ‘cloud’-based, service, the MobileMe team can make improvements and push updates to MobileMe without any action being required of MobileMe customers. Since server-side updates are a bit more innocuous than a standard software update to Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, it’s easy not to notice that updates are occurring. Usually the only hint of these updates is that things just ‘work better.’”

Or, rather, they work as they were originally intended to.