Think Apple Maps Is Bad? Remember the Tale of MobileMe

As Apple deals with the backlash and criticism from the bumpy launch of Apple Maps, it's easy to forget that this isn't the first time Apple has stumbled with a new product.

While Apple Maps is far from the company's finest hour, it pales in comparison to what might have been the most problematic Apple launch of all time: MobileMe.

Launched in the summer of 2008, alongside the iPhone 3G and iOS 2.0, MobileMe was Apple's first real stab at a cloud services platform. MobileMe was the predecessor to iCloud and it offered many similar services, including:

• Cloud-hosted email, contacts and calendars that sync between devices
• The ability to track lost or stolen devices
• The ability to back up photos and documents

Unfortunately for Apple, very few of those features worked when the service launched in July 2008. Instead, customers with existing .Mac accounts experienced massive problems migrating to a new account, email was delayed — or didn't work at all — and the service itself couldn't stay online.

To make matters worse — MobileMe was as pay service. Customers were paying $99 a year for Apple's suite of cloud services and the services weren't even accessible.

And unlike Apple Maps — which has a number of alternatives — for its users, MobileMe was responsible for email, calendars and contacts. Imagine if Gmail was down for hours at a time for no rhyme or reason. Imagine if it's reliability was so bad, it lost 10% of all messages received by the server in one week. Now imagine you were actually paying $100 a year for this service . That was MobileMe.

Even Walt Mossberg panned the service, calling it "too flawed to be reliable."

A week after MobileMe launched, Apple finally responded to the disaster with a rare status page/blog promising to keep customer abreast of downtime and scheduled improvements. The company also ended up giving customers four months of free MobileMe service because of the outages.

This is how I described MobileMe in November 2008 after a 7-hour mail outage impacted users of the service:

Despite my vocal misgivings about the service, before it even launched, I signed up for a 60-day trial in early July — so I could "eat my own dogfood" — as they say. And even though my service was extended for free until December, I canceled in September. Why? Because the service proved it wasn't reliable enough for any sort of email communication, its calendar syncing was complete junk, and it seemed like every time I tried to access the service, it was either slow as all get out or unavailable. Free or not, that just isn't worth the hassle.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

If we can learn anything from the MobileMe debacle, it is that even the worst Apple products can improve over time. After a few rocky months, MobileMe became consistently more reliable as a service. In fact, I even rejoined the service back in 2010.

Today, Apple's iCloud isn't always perfect, but it handles calendar, contact and file syncing like a champ and is a pretty great email provider too. I still prefer Google Apps for most of my cloud needs, but overall, iCloud is excellent.

Now, to be clear, Apple needs to start fixing and improving its mapping tool as soon as it can, but MobileMe is proof that a subpar service can become better over time.

What Was Worse: MobileMe or Apple Maps?

On Twitter, I played a little game of "would you rather" with my followers, asking them to pick between Apple Maps or the MobileMe launch.

Almost universally, every response was in favor of Apple Maps. MobileMe was such a disaster, no one wanted to go back.

I can't say I blame them. As Glenn Fleishman said, Apple Maps is better because of all the easy alternatives.

Longtime Apple sufferers, we'd like to hear you take. Which launch was worse? Apple Maps or MobileMe? Vote in our poll and then let us know your thoughts in the comments.