“.Mac is the answer to Apple making bigger inroads into business,” Scott Kleinberg blogs for The Chicago Tribune (RedEye).
“Apple has all of these plans for exchange e-mail of course and no way to harness it other than to tell companies that exchange is available?” Kleinberg writes. “Of course not. It’s got to be much more involved than that. And while Apple could partner with Microsoft and create a Mac version of Outlook, that’s not Apple’s style.”
Kleinberg writes, “Apple takes a step into a new territory every day … a little step on Photoshop with photo editing tools in iPhoto … a bigger step on Microsoft with iWork … Apple has this one covered. It has from day one. It just never used it to its full potential. Somehow, some way, I believe that this was the plan for Apple all along … a powerful, robust way to tie together corporate e-mail, calendars, etc., that’s all Apple and just a little touch of Microsoft.”
Kleinberg writes, “And you know what it will do? It will flatten the morale at RIM pretty quickly. Like a BlackBerry pancake, if you will.”
“.Mac is Apple’s next big thing, and it always has been… .Mac will become as important a piece to Apple as Outlook became to Microsoft,” Kleinberg writes.
“If you combine this amazing functionality with an iPhone, your iPhone is going to become your personal organizer on steroids in a hurry. Over-the-air calendar and e-mail updating via 3G and Wi-Fi,” Kleinberg writes. When Apple finally releases “the second coming of .Mac,” Apple should “drop the $99 price tag” and make .Mac free.
Full article here.
Apple doesn’t need to make .Mac free to succeed, just more reasonable. I think most people balk at $99 for what you essentially get for free via Google & Yahoo (storage space, contact book, email, etc.). If .Mac was $19.99, $24.99 or $29.99, there would be greater appeal and consequently much greater success.
I havent bought into .mac yet but if they beef it up just a little bit more I will be sold… a price drop or free would be ideal but I doubt it will happen.
Well, if this is true, it is a good direction. I have been fuming at the prospect of having to switch to using Entourage in order to get OTA synchronization on my iPhone. I came from an Exchange environment using Outlook and the Treo 750. I enter calendar items all the time, and if I don’t remember to sync my iPhone, then my desktop calendar doesn’t match. OTA is going to be great.
There are two caveats though. First, Apple needs to add a task (to do) app to the iPhone. Second, Apple has to enable its phone to read its own files. On my WinMobile phone, I could take along Word documents, PowerPoint files etc. Now I can’t take my Pages and Keynote files along. My iPhone doesn’t read them.
If .MAC is going to be useful (and if I have to use Entourage to sync, I’ll surely dump .MAC), then Apple has to tie all the pieces together.
So….. .mac gets an upgrade by using MS’ active sync, now all iphones and iPod touches can sync with .Mac.
Millions of people start buying iphones for business….
Outlook takes a hit because MS licensed Active Sync to Apple.
Priceless.
OK — in case you missed it on the other similar post today…
.Mac is like 70-75 bucks on Amazon.
Save money and buy it there. I’ve been using for years, and it is a nice product, simple solution.
@ Timbo
No . . . your comment works here too! While M$ is working hard to transform the Zune to be almost as good as the iPod Classic, Apple jumps so far ahead it’s laughable. Imagine how great it will be to have that iPod Touch / iPhone with .Mac working in the background? I give Zune less than a year till it all falls apart. BTW I wanted Zune to be awesome . . . I like innovation making things better. Too bad Zune never really tried innovation, aside from squirting songs it was all copy whatever works.
I’ve been a .Mac user for years, and it was overpriced (but handy) to keep my macs all synced up. I used a few other features but stayed on BECAUSE of iWeb. I can put up a great small password protected websites in 10 minutes for work, and I find it a GREAT way to make a presentation when I can’t be there.
A Couple of days ago Apple sent me a detailed survey all about .Mac with questions about what features I use / would like to see. I told them exactly what I wanted. It’s pretty obvious there is a change coming . . .
More storage? Faster connections?
Aside from making it free(which I don’t agree with), Apple needs to speed up the bandwith both into and out of the Dot Mac servers.. it’s still painfully slow.
The “second coming”???? Actually, this would make it at least the third if not the fourth coming of Dot Mac.
Apple needs to drop the price, since I have the family pack (making the price a little reasonable), but am leaning away because it costing more than it should. A price drop and beefier would definitely keep me.
For my purposes .Mac is useful enough to maintain a subscription. However, the iDisk upload of large files could function better. After I drop a locally stored file’s icon onto an iDisk folder, a progress bar seems to indicate that the upload has taken just a few seconds, but then the “finishing…” message sits there without providing a clue as to how far along the “finishing” is progressing. (Not just with iDisk, I’ve observed the problem with other WebDAV storage accessed via a Mac.)
.Mac should be $79/year WITHOUT an iPhone and either free or as high as $19/year WITH one. For that price (but not any higher), I’d get .Mac after getting an iPhone.
.Mac the next big thing? Yeah . . . maybe if they make it *work* properly. Ever tried backing up a couple of gigs? Do you have a day spare? And why do they make it (a) so hard to obtain tech support and (b) so very, very difficult to unsubscribe. How *can* you do that, by the way? I have been *massively* unimpressed with .Mac to date. Essentially, it’s a complete rip-off and the very model of appalling customer service.
hmmm. I think that I’m beginning to fall into the group that feels .mac ought to be free- to an extent- perhaps free email with a low limit, and a few MB of sync capabilities for ical and contacts. I’m perfectly happy paying $99-/ for my storage, we use iWeb quite extensively. I think making an entry level basic service free or nearly free would get folks hooked on the other features not to mention extending the benefits of the OSX platform in general. For example, if every mac had built in backup for email accounts, address books calendars and, a free 20MB email account, how much would that cost to provide, and (VS) how many switchers would the ensuing buzz generate. I think they’d sell a significant number of macs with that feature.
Only if they bundled .Mac functionality into MacOS X Server would businesses consider it as a viable alternative to Outlook.
I’d be willing to pay a little for syncing, but that’s really the only feature that I can’t easily get elsewhere. I have my own domain hosting, my own email, and local external hard drives are much faster for back up than iDisk.
I’d pay $20/year for 1) syncing my iPhone and my iMac, and 2) a hosted photo gallery to which I can post pictures from my iPhone. I don’t need anything else, and don’t want to pay $80 more for it.
I have tried .Mac a couple of times and….. I just do not get it. Like above, I get e-mail from google and yahoo.
Would I go to .Mac??
Make the price 35$ per year and 65$ a year depending on use.
Keep the mac to mac capability.
Keep the web site support.
Add features for tying all the Mac products together.
And its reasonable that I would buy into it.
But now its just a want-a-bee that is priced way to high. Sorry.
en
I wouldn’t mind $70 a year for .mac. However, they need to up the online storage space to 20 or more GB.
“OK — in case you missed it on the other similar post today…
.Mac is like 70-75 bucks on Amazon.”
If you buy it at Best Buy, it’s $100, but when you sign up, you’re sent a $30 check.
I don’t want free.
Google/Yahoo/MSN etc ‘free’ is scanning your emails etc for keywords to sell to advertisers. Free in dollars and cents maybe but that is the least important kind of free. Did you read (and understand) all the small print in the user agreement, the copyright clauses for one? Lots of lawyers don’t understand it, they reckon it needs to be tested in court. Until then all your data belongs to ??? – it’s a gray area.
Land of the free, if it wasn’t so ironic it would be amusing.
Sorry but Apple lost me with dot Mac. I’ve paid for 4 years of it and feel like I through away $350. No more. My mail is on Google, my Calendar is on Google. My pictures are on Flickr. My videos are on YouTube. And I couldn’t be happier.
dotMac is dead brand the might as well sell it to Microsoft
I don’t get it with .Mac. Apple are will to use iTunes sales to drive Pod sales; iTunes Movie rental to drive AppleTV sales; various software freebies to drive iPhone sales; iWork to help drive computer sales. To tie all together —- gimmy a ‘C note’????? I think they need to wake up and use a free conduit to tie everything together by utilizing .Mac. Come on Apple put everything in one sack and drive your hardware sales even further and faster for the common person.
.Mac needs to be free but with very little storage – like 10MBs – pay for more. I paid for it once – and was never able to connect because the service was too slow in my neck of the woods. I never asked for a refund; and I’ll never pay for it again without proof that it works.
I use Google because it’s free and that’s the only reason. If Apple makes .Mac free I’ll switch over in no time flat but I just can’t see Apple doing this any time soon.
@ John Gee
Can you use the boxed version to renew or just initial sign up. Can a US boxed version be used for a .mac account in Australia. I’m paying the equivalent of 235 USD here for a family pack.