Apple's MobileMe email down again

As we've pointed out before, running an online service is very different to building great computers and software, as Apple continue to prove with their disastrous MobileMe launch: down again for a whole European working day, apparently because they don't have 24x7 support on it. US-centric or plain dumb?

Apple and Microsoft (with Live Office) are bidding to join Google in the online services arena but don't have Google's experience in running web-based tools that almost never go down.

This could be a critical factor in who wins the next phase of computing's evolution.