ON APPLE'S INADEQUATE DOTMAC (Part III)

CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR

Now it's the Unofficial Apple Weblog (aka TUAW), taking a swipe at Apple's .Mac (aka dotmac) service, following recent posts by Om Malik and myself on separate occasions.

In a piece titled ".Mac's slow death", TUAW notes:

"...Google introduced (free) Gmail with oodles more storage than .Mac offers, calendars and so on. To make a long story short, I'm about to give .Mac the boot for good."

The post then goes on to systematically compare Apple's service to Google's Gmail, ending with the following punchline (spoiler alert):

"In my brief roundup, Google won 5:1. I do love Apple, and I say this as someone who wants to see his loved one do well: Please, oh please revamp .Mac. I don't care about new iPods, a new enclosure for the iMac or even iLife '07.

Let's make January's Macworld keynote all about .Mac, and really blow the doors off of the thing. I'm talking about the kind of ground-up feature explosion that will make even non-geeks say, "Wow."

All I can say is, Amen.

Comments

[Ted Rheingold]

It's a stunning failure if you ask me. Not only have they frittered away a once-popular community, they are now years off track from have an deeply integrated run-of-software-and-service community.

iTunes should already have socializing tools that could make it as social as YouTube, but they can't even get .mac working. The same iChat profile, should be my same iTune profile, my same .mac, FrontRow, iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, WWDC, MacBookPro UserGroup, etc. etc. and sociality hooks should already be deeply integrated in all these pieces of software that can be stand alone just within that passion or crossover into all the other Apple things you're into.

But instead their 5 year old effort is D.O.A both is respect to revenue and community and they'll be playing catchup for years.