MobileMe woke up in a puddle of its own tears. This wasn’t unusual. Since February 24th MobileMe had been ‘living on a prayer’ to quote the famous Bon Jovi song. Nobody could reach it. For a service whose job was to keep people connected it was ironic. Perhaps MobileMe would’ve laughed if it ever stopped crying. But considering its heavy use of the ‘alcohol’ and ‘tissue’ app laughing didn’t appear to be likely.
Steve Jobs never loved MobileMe. It thought about better times as it searched for ice cream at a local dollar store. Unfortunately MobileMe couldn’t remember any time it felt truly happy. Nor could it find the Butter-Pecan flavored ice cream. Right from the start people heavily criticized the young service, calling it unstable. Didn’t they know what would happen if they called MobileMe unstable? It would crash a countless number of times out of pure spite. Apple users are a fickle bunch so MobileMe didn’t get hurt by the criticism. Hearing Steve Jobs say “it was not up to Apple’s standards” hurt. It hurt a lot.
Perhaps if Steve Jobs had read to it as a child things might have been different. Then it could’ve gained confidence. Steve never played ball with it as a child, never took it out fishing or even said he loved it. MobileMe thought of itself as a mistake. Nobody cared about it. At least it thought this was an internal problem that it might solve with the help of its therapist, Dr. Netscape. Of course this took place before that faithful Monday.
June 6th, 2011 marked the end of MobileMe. After being out of commission for so long it didn’t feel productive. Rather than being a cloud service it had clouds overhead each and every day. How could MobileMe find new work now that iCloud took over its position? It worked so hard at doing such a mediocre, sub-par job. Now it watched Steve Jobs and iCloud drink champagne to celebrate its induction into the Apple family. MobileMe was the black sheep of the family: all other Apple products had an ‘i’ in front of their names. By not having one, it stuck out like a sore thumb.
What now? MobileMe asked. Apple wasn’t the only computer maker in town. It could go elsewhere. For a little while it thought of going to Gateway but upon second thought wasn’t sure
whether or not Gateway computers had internet capabilities yet. Dolling itself up for the street, it is a street walking cheetah with a hand full of napalm. Each time a computer company executive drives by in an extended limo it comes to the window and offers its service. The rates seemed reasonable to it: $50 for quickie photo storage, $100 to put a music file way up in there. Yes, it needed to whore itself out, to prove it could make it.
Going through the rain to the bad part of town to its basement apartment, it would prove to Steve Jobs exactly what this ‘unstable’ cloud service could do. Quickly it finished checking Facebook and its blog hits and went to bed. Though today was dramatic perhaps tomorrow would be okay.