Fix .Mac

I’ve been a big fan of .mac, since back when it was free and called iTools. Apple’s move to create .mac—including email at mac dot com alongside the iDisk, an online 100MB space where one can easily save, share, and backup files, sync information between multiple machines, or serve up a personal website—was a very forward-thinking move when it was first announced. It is still a good virtual space, especially for the not-so-web-savvy; however, I’d like to see Apple make a few changes to keep the .mac service ahead of the curve. To do that, Apple’s web platform needs to take a few lessons from both OS X and from Google.

What ever happened to free?

I have to admit that I was a bit aggravated when Apple made the previously free iTools into the $99 a year .mac. Sure, there were multiple added benefits to the newer .mac service. Meanwhile, as far as I was concerned, my email address had just been kidnapped and was being held for ransom. Either I paid up for the yearly subscription to .mac, or I lost my @mac.com email address. I’m glad I paid the money, because the iDisk and the various free bits of software that have been bundled with the service have made .mac worth it.  Unfortunately, the downside of ponying up the ransom has been that the email hasn’t really changed that much.  $99 today buys me the same sporadically and inexplicably buggy email service that I had for free with iTools.

Apple had the right idea in the beginning: bundle the iTools service with all newly purchased computers, absorb the cost into the machines, and benefit from the free advertising received from all those @mac.com emails whisking their way through cyberspace. Every .mac email is a little happy piece of Apple-branded advertising saying “I prefer to use Apple machines” to all those non-Mac people who receive it. With the purchase of either OS X or a new Mac, you get the iLife suite for free, but you also have the option to purchase it separately, and I think this is the move that Apple should have, and now should, make with .mac (especially since there is rather tight integration between the iLife suite and .mac). If “Every Mac needs .mac,” then why sell me one without it?

What $99 a year can buy you:

Apple’s 15MB of email storage space on .mac was dwarfed by Google announcing Gmail earlier this year. In case you haven’t heard, Gmail is Google’s gigabyte of free (read ad-supported) fully-searchable email (currently in beta). Let’s look at this in numbers: $99 for .mac gets you 100MBs of combined iDisk space for all your backups, files, and websites, as well as 15MBs of email space.
$0 for Gmail (with the exception of the advertising) gets you 1GB (roughly 1,024MBs of email space).

There are some understandable reasons for this discrepancy in space and cost. You cannot store and backup your files to Gmail. . . at least not easily. An industrious user could send backuped files in 10MB email attachments to his / her Gmail account (although this technically goes against Gmail’s user agreement). You cannot host a website on your Gmail account. But, then again, Google offers another free service, Blogger, where you can host your own website for free on blogspot. Granted, none of this is as nice or convenient as iDisk and the iLife suite’s easy integration with .mac, but it is free.

If you want to stay free and get most of the benefits of .mac, you could look into SpyMac, who offers a free service including 1GB of email, 100MB of web space, 250MB of picture storage, and iCal hosting.  In my experience, the SpyMac service is a bit on the slow side. The email can be slow and at times is hard to access.  While Google and .mac are both backed by big companies, with SpyMac’s free service, you get what you pay for, so don’t complain too much.

Another option: for $99 a year, a bit of searching, and a little elbow grease, you can find a pretty good webhost, where you can serve up your own site and configure compatibility with iSync, iCal, and other bits and pieces of .mac functionality on your own. With this type of setup, you can actually do more than you can with .mac, because you can easily set up your own domain name for about $5-10 a year that will point to your site. On such a space, you can even setup your own custom favicon (the little icon next to a sites name in the menu bar in Safari) and a custom page for people lost on your site (rather than Apple’s generic “Member’s page not found” page). You can even have .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) as your email address. If you’re spending $100 a year, you might as well advertise yourself rather than Apple.

Now, Apple could simply add all these bits of functionality to .mac to bring themselves up to speed. But, I have a better idea that will put them back where they belong: ahead of the curve…

Online Office Killer

A recent Slashdot post asks if it is time to kill off Microsoft Word. The answer is yes. Kottke may have the answer to the “how” of killing off Word:

What we could see is the next generation of office suite. Not Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook of Microsoft’s Office or iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, iTunes, and Garageband of Apple’s iLife suite, but Google search, Gmail, Google Browser, Blogger, and perhaps even GIM. It’ll be interesting to watch whether this happens or not.

It would be a good idea, beyond the Gmail and the regular blogging bit, for Google to come out with a web-based word processor and data repository where people could WYSIWYG create documents, save them to a password-protected server space (like an iDisk) and access, edit, save, and print these files from anywhere there is an internet connection.  It would be an even better idea if Apple did it, complete with Keynote integration, a new Apple blogging app, and new word-processing and spreadsheet iApps that would integrate with this new online office.  Given Apple’s recent penchant for open source software, why not work on porting an Apple-branded variant of Open Office to the world wide web, hosted on Apple space?  If it could be made to run smoothly enough, it would be a definite Microsoft Office killer as well as the next logical step forward towards virtual self-storage.  As a writer and educator, I’d find such a program to be well worth $99 and the great killer app for which I have been waiting.

Apple, you are perfectly poised for this innovative move. Make it!