The "change" was to leverage third-party cloud service providers, as Apple continues to do so today. These hyperscale providers generally have better expertise

The "change" was to leverage third-party cloud service providers, as Apple continues to do so today. These hyperscale providers generally have better expertise as regards commodity compute, networking, and storage than Apple itself–issues around which were said to be the root cause of the original MobileMe service outages. This change (at the outset) also allowed Apple to develop significant expertise at the metadata layer, at which it excels today.