The story's been going around about
Apple extending
.Mac memberships. To recap what
.Mac is, it's Apple's new umbrella name for their internet services, in some ways reminiscent of
.NET Services. It's also a rebranded entirely-for-cost version of Apple's previous
iTools services.
This for-cost issue has caused a lot of contention in the online Macintosh community as this feature that was supposed to be "free for life" is now $50-$100 per year. But, as the so-called
dot-com era has show us, "Free For Life" often means "free for the lifetime of the provider, which is often very short indeed". The other free disk space services were often slow, had difficult to use web interfaces, and ultimately - they're gone. Aside from
Hotmail and
Yahoo's free mail services, most of the other major ones are gone - although to my surprise, my
Excite account is still alive, but the email account was (unsurprisingly) wiped out.
And even Hotmail's for-free feature set keeps shrinking - and with good cause. It's a huge strain to provide service and uptime for these services, a fact that no one appreciates when things are running well but everyone will raise a ruckus about when services go down. If you take the current list of Apple's iTools accounts and multiply it by the basic size of services offered under the old free banner (20Mb iDisk space, 5Mb Email storage), the resulting amount of disk space involved is immense. Many of these accounts are hardly ever used - until I paid for my .Mac account, I seldom used the iDisk. Many people admit to having multiple accounts for varying reasons too. The reasons include forgotten passwords (so they just created a new account), running multiple sites, or just setting up an account quickly for assorted other reasons and then discarding the account. But on Apple's side, whether any of these accounts are commonly used or not, they're expected to be available instantly.
A friend of mine who previously worked at a company that did messaging services for large corporations told me about their system - they had boxes and systems that theoretically could house thousands and thousands of accounts on a single machine. But the company's biggest selling point was uptime guaruntee, and these boxes needed to be restored from a backup in less than an hour. This was impossible to do if you maxed out a machine's potential - a restore could take 22 hours. So, hard limits (500 accounts) and high prices were put on these services because of the work involved in the service availability guaruntee.
So Apple has many of the same issues to deal with, I'm sure. If the
Backup software Apple offers to its .Mac users stores its files to iDisk, my iDisk data had better be there when I need it! And of course, I always expect my mac.com email to be available (and over the years since iTools started, there have been downtimes, but nothing major and nothing recent).
So, a couple of weeks ago, I payed for my subscription. Partially, it was to keep the email address (which I don't use too much any more, except for some mailing lists), but it was also because I was interested in what .Mac (and similarly, whatever Microsoft's .NET services turn out to be, which may be
MSN 8) means to the continued integration of the internet and web into more common pieces of our computing life beyond the browser. Apple has done a good (and arguably sneaky) job of integrating .Mac into "Mac OS X":
- It's very easy to mount your iDisk in the Finder, and since switching iDisk's protocol from AppleTalk to WebDAV (I believe), the connection stays up forever (AppleTalk would time out, and I don't know how well it survived a 'sleep' operation). Speed is pretty good.
- It's very easy to same to the iDisk from any application. And not just to the iDisk itself, but directly into its top level folders. This can be done without even expanding the navigation browser of any save-file dialog.
- The integration with the iApps, particularly iPhoto and iCal are nice. Neither app requires a .Mac membership to work, but using .Mac offers some nice conviences for sharing photos and calendars. And iPhoto, like Windows XP, offers nice integration with other web services for ordering prints and photo books directly from the application.
- If the conspiracy theory I'm sticking with about why Apple's extended the discount .Mac signup period hold true, then we should be seeing iSync soon. And iSync might offer the most compelling reason yet to use .Mac (I hope and hope and hope it does) - doing palm like synchronization of Calendars and Contacts between Macs, using .Mac as the central repository/transport. How this turns out remains to be seen, but it's my not-so-secret wish for the future.
I expect there to be more services in the future, and since I and many others are now paying for those services - Apple now has a bigger incentive to make sure the services keep humming along. And, since I and many others are now paying for those services, the users have more incentive to actually use them. I've been a fairly happy subscriber thus far, and in the next post I'll talk about the impressive Web Applications Apple has running, and some ruminations about the state and use of different web application servers.