Here's One Reason Why iCloud Has Been Such A Mess

With its soaring stock price and hugely popular products, Apple has become synonymous with success.

While that's generally true for the company's hardware, its online services, like iCloud, are a totally different story.

One reason is because Apple has no central dedicated team to work on these services, reports The Information's Jessica Lessin.

That means whenever Apple wants to create new online services, they have to rebuild a lot of the underlying technology. This is a legacy of the way Apple is organized: the company is so secretive, it often isolates product groups from each other so product details won't leak.

This has become a real problem in the case of iCloud. You probably heard about iCloud last summer.

iCloud can be used to store photos taken on users' iPhones. That became a problem when hackers went after some celebrities' iCloud accounts and posted their nude photos online.

Apple has since instituted a new privacy policy and enabled two-factor authentication for iCloud in order to reassure users, but the incident damaged Apple's reputation.

iCloud isn't Apple's first stab at online services, either.

Before iCloud there was MobileMe, which users didn't like. It was expensive, and Google offered similar services for free.

There's no telling when Apple will learn from its stumbles in the cloud. But it might start by hiring a team to do just that.