Yesterday marked an important milestone in Apple’s cloud strategy; the shuttering of MobileMe. The iWork website is next on the chopping block and is currently scheduled to be shutdown on July 31.
iCloud, introduced last year along side iOS 5 is the replacement for MobileMe and iWork. MobileMe used to be a $99/year subscription service for synchronizing all sorts of information between your Macs, PCs and iPhones. Even though the MobileMe service is, for all intents and purposes, “closed,” subscribers can still login to the MobileMe.com website and migrate their data over to Apple’s new iCloud service.
iWork.com was launched in 2009 as a way for iWork ’09 users to share their iWork documents with others. Visitors to the iWork.com website are greeted a warning banner that the service is closing down at the end of the month. iWork.com users were also notified via email that they will need to download their documents or risk losing them.
MobileMe has not been the shining star that Apple had hoped it would be. In Walter Isaacson’s autobiography of the late Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs, it is recorded that Walt Mossberg’s headline regarding MobileMe was “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far TooFlawed to Be Reliable.” Anyone who has followed Steve Jobs “second act” at Apple knows that a headline was not going to be allowed to stand. Mr. Isaacon also recounts Mr. Jobs f-bomb laced furry at the MobileMe team.
I was never a subscriber to MobileMe, as the $99 annual price tag seemed a bit steep for an email account, cloud storage, and personal data syncing, especially since Google offered similar services for free. (And I was a Palm Pre/webOS user at the time.)
MobileMe users can start their iCloud migration from MobileMe.com.