There has been a lot of buzz in the last few days about the future of Apple’s much maligned online service, dot mac. (or .Mac if you prefer) It started during Jobs’ interview in the all things D conference where he admitted that .mac was in need of some lovin’ This of course led to rampant speculation, including the notion that has somehow taken hold that Apple is going to announce a partnership with Google to provide .mac services.
Of course this Idea has been stretched to extremes by bloggers and journalists, with some suggesting that Apple would move users wholesale over to Google and kill .mac outright. I doubt very much that this will happen. Google does have the back end to power an online service like .mac, but whether Apple could or would do a partnership to with Google to have an Apple branded service running on Google’s servers is another thing. One thing for sure is that Apple will not give up it’s only online service on a world increasingly dominated by web 2.0 services and communities like Flickr, MySpace and Gmail. Apple’s lack of an effective presence in this area must surely be a source of embarrassment to the company.
A partnership with Google would certainly jump-start their efforts to reform .mac, but Apple should have the resources to provide their own technologies to power such a service. I guess time will tell.
Charles Jade from Wired makes another interesting observation:
“Rather than attempting to artificially delineate between .Mac and OS X, Apple should simply declare .Mac’s features to be part of OS X, eliminating .Mac along with the subscription price of $99 a year. This has the immediate benefit of making it unnecessary to actually fix .Mac, in the same way that Apple has yet to fix the Finder.”
Again, I don’t know if this is something I can see happening, but You never know.
I wrote an article a while ago with my own thoughts on what Apple could do to revitalize .mac and I still think much of that holds today. I would love to see an online service from Apple that shows the innovation the company constantly demonstrates in other aspects of its product lines.
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