Is MobileMe the ONE?

The 3G iPhone and the accompanied MobileMe service introduced in WWDC 2008 stirred the buzz in the blogosphere as ever.

MobileMe logo
MobileMe logo

The MobileMe tries to solve the long-lasting synchronization problem, which Microsoft have not figured out a panacea for both enterprise market and mass customers. Apple’s answer seems like an intuitive and elegant solution in the first impression, and we may wonder, is MobileMe the ONE?

I really doubt it, based on some common sense and reasonable guess as the service is not available so far, please correct me in your comment if I am wrong.

Push model may not cross the enterprise boundary

Push mail has been very successful in the enterprise world, but why there are no such things like push document, push worksheet? The instantaneous synchronization is just purely wasted in most cases, even not that inviting in the Corp net which is powered by Gigabit ethernet, let alone the consumers are using much slower high speed internet or 3G wireless connection.

There is no silver bullet to resolve conflicts

MobileMe supports family pack, so it is possible that one file is edited in different computers. The conflict has to be resolved however fast the synchronization is. We also need to track the version number because it is hard to tell which copy is the latest without network time synchronization, so ultimately MobileMe would be a version control system. But according to my personal experience, there is no more intuitive way to resolve the conflict than three-way diff. But this is less user-friendly and not an available option if you are working with images or videos.

Accessibility and Interoperability

These are not big issues for die hard Apple fans. I believe Bonjour would automatically configure the firewall and all made-by-Apple applications would talk to MobileMe without any problem. No idea whether Apple would release the protocol document, like Microsoft did recently, to encourage 3rd party interoperability.

I personally prefer SSH, RSync and SVN( maybe Mercury later), periodically back up to my friends in a different zip code for extra safety.