Online services are not Apple’s strong point. Unlike Microsoft, Google, or Amazon, Apple hasnt’ really gotten into the groove. Case in point: MobileMe was revamped into iCloud, which was then hacked and abused in high-profile cases we’ve all read about. It also suffers from tons of downtime, which further goes to credibility of the company and it’s iCloud product. The problems all started with MobileMe, which first came out in 2008. It was used for the Mac and other desktop-based services like iWeb. It cost $150 a year, wasn’t used by very many people, and didn’t work well very often.
When OS X and iOS started to merge in 2010, Apple released iCloud and worked in features of MobileMe. It had more stuff that users wanted, like location tracking, iMessage, and different email addresses. Unfortunately, iMessage has had multiple outages and iCloud got hacked several times. People are asking Apple to open iCloud up for developers to work on, but we’ll see.
