Apple: MobileMe on the Mend

Although a storm of bugs rained down upon the heads and shoulders of MobileMe subscribers in July, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has been doing a lot more than apologizing, offering free service extensions and handing out umbrellas. It turns out that Apple has been working at the source -- the servers driving the so-called cloud -- to mop the little issues leaking from the MobileMe cloud.

On Wednesday, the company published a MobileMe support document detailing some behind-the-scenes action Apple has been taking to improve MobileMe.

"Apple is always working to improve MobileMe. 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," the document stated. "Since server-side updates are a bit more innocuous than a standard software update to Mac OS X or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows, it's easy not to notice that updates are occurring. Usually the only hint of these updates is that things just 'work better.'"

Public Snafu

When Apple first rolled out MobileMe earlier this year, it left some users without access to e-mail for days -- and that was just one of many widely documented problems. Apple wasn't at first particularly forthcoming about what was going on, and the public relations noise got so loud that CEO Steve Jobs eventually admitted -- in an internal corporate e-mail, perhaps meant to be leaked to the press -- that MobileMe wasn't up to Apple's standards. At the same time, Jobs installed Eddy Cue as the new leader of the MobileMe and Internet services team.

Nearly two months later, it's now apparent that Apple hasn't been idle with MobileMe. The company noted that about two dozen features/issues have been improved or resolved. More specifically, Apple improved localization for MobileMe Web applications and improved member name suggestions for member names that are already taken. In MobileMe Mail, Apple has fixed reply-to all-issues, misbehaving keyboard shortcuts and messages that wouldn't vacate Draft status. It's also increased performance with Internet Explorer 7, improved junk mail filtering and made logging into MobileMe mail faster, among a few other tweaks.

For MobileMe Accounts, Apple improved MobileMe data transfer details, the accuracy of used storage in Group iDisk and storage allocation for family sub-accounts. It now lets you fully log out of MobileMe when clicking on Logout.

MobileMe Calendar picked up some performance improvements as well -- better Firefox 3 compatibility and overall reliability.

Contacts is now more reliable, and users can again export vCards. Gallery has an improved iPhone/iPod touch interface, and edited photos are now correctly updated.

The Cloud and the Telephone

Cloud-based services are similar to utility services like the telephone, yet they are also very different for different kinds of customers.

"When a company is buying cloud-based services, one assumes that before a company commits resources, there will be service level agreements in place, and the payment and penalties will accrue depending on how closely the cloud service provider delivers on the agreements," Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, told MacNewsWorld.

"With the consumer, you're pretty much in the same place as your telephone service. If the phone dies, you might be out of service for two days, but it's not like the phone company knocks off a fifteenth of your phone bill. What's interesting is how opaque it all is," he explained.

Most consumers of cloud-based services, it turns out, are pretty much at the mercy of the service provider. If something goes wrong, there's not a lot a consumer can do other than cancel the service. On the flip side, service providers are constantly updating and upgrading software and equipment.

"These kind of tweaks and load balancing and updating is something that goes on constantly, and Apple just acknowledged that it was happening," King said, noting that most consumer-facing infrastructure providers like phone and water companies make fixes and upgrades all the time, yet they don't ever mention the day-to-day efforts.