Google and Apple - Compared
July 24, 2008 – 10:21 amGoogle: releases a suite of web apps for email, calendar, contacts. Price: Free.
Apple: releases a suite of web apps… Price: $99/yr
Google: Continues to refer to these products as Beta
Apple: Refers to these products as complete and ready for use
Google: All services work well and users experience few if any reliability issues
Apple: Seven days, no email. The other services appear to work fine but users have reported a host of problems.
Google releases a beta and it works flawlessly. Apple releases a finished product only to have to go back and fix a lot of problems.
This is very unusual for Apple. I love my Apple products and have had good experiences with them. This MobileMe stuff, though, has been crazy. As I’ve mentioned before, once they work out the kinks it will be a great product (except for the name - who came up with that?). They probably should have waited a little longer to release it, however.
Update:
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has a good overview of MobileMe, including a look at all of the problems that have been present with the service. His conclusion? MobileMe is a great idea but too flawed to be recommended.