A "leaked" email from Steve Jobs to the MobileMe team shows that Apple's boss has finally and officially understood what everybody else already knew: Apple is incapable for now of running a MobileMe service, as it is incapable to provide critical security patches in a timely manner (see DNS flaw).

In the email, Steve Jobs says that MobileMe clearly needed more time and testing (doh!), it should have been launched gradually (syncing first, a month later Mail and another month after that Calendar), and it was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store.

It's always good for somebody to acknowledge their own limitations, but interestingly enough Apple is not willing to do what seems more appropriate now: shut down MobileMe and launch it in a year when it is ready. Instead, Jobs says that the MobileMe team needs to work hard to make it work well by the end of the year. Until then, good luck to all MobileMe customers! Maybe you will not lose again your email and contacts, but then again, maybe you will.

Thus the call by ZDNet blogger Jason D. O'Grady which asks Apple to shut down MobileMe immediately and refund the money they charges is more than appropriate. Interestingly enough, a vote on the page shows that 36 percent of users also want Apple to shut down MobileMe and refund charges, while 34 want Apple to keep it running and 30 percent want for Apple to keep MobileMe but issue more refunds to compensate for the lack of quality of their service.

Recently, it was unveiled that it took Apple three whole months to patch a critical DNS flaw, made public two weeks earlier when all major companies (including Cisco and Microsoft) have issued patches. Thus Apple was really the last OS vendor to update their operating systems.