ON APPLE LAGGING IN ONLINE SERVICES

TIGHT FIT AHEAD

Another day, another potentially "hip and cool" product and service from Apple, this time in partnership with Nike.  As the press release describes it:

"The new Nike+ Air Zoom Moire is the first footwear designed to talk to iPod. Nike plans to make many of its leading footwear styles Nike+ ready, connecting millions of consumers to the Nike+iPod experience.

With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones. The kit includes an in-shoe sensor and a receiver that attaches to iPod.

A new Nike Sport Music section on the iTunes® Music Store and a new nikeplus.com personal service site help maximize the Nike+iPod experience."

So, a cool, personalized online service, with most of the work done by Nike (the shoe sensor, the online service that tracks the running progress...just add an Apple iPod Nano).

But as Aaron Baar of Adfreaks.com puts it,

"...what I really want is an iPod that will work out for me."

I may be missing something, but where's the innovation in online services from Apple beyond iTunes?

Despite all the recent innovative brilliance and success of a Steve Jobs-driven Apple*, there is one product area in which the company seems to be lagging in the race with competitors on both price and quality.

And that is ".Mac" (aka dotmac),  the "other" online service offering from Apple, after it's market-leading iTunes music and video store.

Here's what the service offers, as described on it's own web-site, under the slogan, "Create with iLife, Share with .Mac" :

Your life. On the Internet.

• Publish in One Click with iWeb
• Photocast with iPhoto
• Exchange Files from Anywhere
• Stay in Sync
• Communicate the Way You Want
• Back Up Your Life
• Bring Groups Together

All admirable features.  And much needed by increasingly mainstream consumers trying to cope with a deluge of digital photos, videos, and music files. 

And that's BEFORE Apple releases it's long-rumored digital media hub.

At it's core though, .Mac is about services around online storage.

This is an area where there's been an explosion of consumer offerings both by startups and services to come from the majors like Google "GDrive"), Microsoft (LiveDrive) and others. 

It's also an area I've been focused on for some time now, both in terms of the opportunity and the challenges of the rapidly evolving business model.

It's important to note that even before formal online storage offerings from Google, the company already offers over 2.5 Gigabytes of storage free as part of it's Gmail service.  This of course prompted Yahoo! to bump it's offering to over 1 GB free. 

An enterprising user can do a number of things that .Mac offers, by just creatively using email and this substantive amount of free online storage.

But there are also a number of venture-backed startups that are offering dedicated services in this area.

I commented on a good review done recently by Mike Arrington's TechCrunch, of some of these online storage services. 

The most aggressive service there on pricing at the time of the review, was Streamload, offering a full 25 Gigabytes of storage for free.

In contrast, here's what Apple's .Mac actually offers at "not-free" price points:

-1 Gigabyte of combined storage for email and documents for a single .Mac account, priced at $99 per year (roughly $8.25 per month) .

-If you spring $179.95 for the year (about  $15 per month), you can get the "Family Pack" .Mac package, which offers one master and four sub-accounts (email addresses at .Mac), along with 1 GB of storage to split with the WHOLE family.  That's upgradeable to 4GB for more dough.

The slogans for the service should be "Share with .Mac, but not TOO much!" and "Give us your credit card while you're at it!"

At a time when Apple advertises it's computers and other products as driving a digital-media rich lifestyle for consumers, it's interesting to see how the online features that most encourage digital media usage, compare against what's currently out there.

Hopefully we'll see some renewed focus on this area some time shortly.

* Before I get some feedback from die-hard Apple fans, I'd like to clarify that I've been a big fan and consumer of a lot of Apple products and services over the years, and have posts singing their praises over the past few years. 

But I've been seeking the value in this instance as a long-time .Mac customer.

Disclosure:  I'm an Apple shareholder.

Comments

[candice]

I love how the Mac community tends to be such zealots that you need that disclaimer.

Some things never change.

(And I say this as a unix junkie, tongue placed firmly in cheek. There's an o2 under my desk.)

[howard Lindzon]

You make a great point, but so many of the users, including me just trust the brand and the package and service and the fact that stores are close by (if not now than withinn 3 yerars) when the service part of the equation will really explode.

They still have time to tinker.

[nike shoes]

Do you take donations via paypal?

[nike dunk sb]

Do you know what is the meaning for ?

[Nike Shoes]

i would like to see some nike shoes made by japanese, isn't cool?