Scorpion_6743@Yahoo.com

KJ

Here is another consumer example – maybe you want to invite friends to meet you for drinks at a specific time/place and you are not sitting in front of iCal or Outlook.

Honestly, there are endless examples of how this is relevant to consumers. Yes, you could do this in email, but then your friends have to manually create reminders rather than having an automated one from their calendar.

And yes, it does take time to research, plan, design develop, QA, market and support services like this. Having built commercial software for almost 20 years, I am pretty clear on the process.

It’s unfortunate that you dismiss this article for comparing MobileMe to Enterprise services like Exchange & Blackberry. The reality is that users of smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) and IMAP email are not “regular consumers.” These consumers are more savvy. They might not necessarily read fan sites, but they do business and use MobileMe for that purpose because there is nothing else – except maybe some aspects of Google services) and have higher expectations for service offerings from large institutions such as Apple.

Finally, I do agree with your last sentence of your second post. It is unfortunate that there isn’t an “Exchange/Blackberry Server for the rest of us.” MobileMe is not that service now and it most likely won’t be anytime soon.

However, one can still make requests…

I agree with you. While I believe MobileMe should sync To Dos and Notes (I think it will eventually), and there are other tweaks necessary, overall I think it’s shaping up extremely well as a consumer solution.

In fact, it already offers more than most consumers are likely to take advantage of.

MobileMe is a service designed for regular consumers, and no one else. Period. One could even argue that it isn’t designed for savvy users like those who read Apple fan sites. In addition to all these extra features that would turn MobileMe into *something else,* they would also transform the service’s price into something that even more people would inevitably find reason to bitch about.

It’s unfortunate that there isn’t some kind of “Exchange/BlackBerry Server for the rest of us,” but MobileMe is not it, and may very well never be it.