What the Heck is .Mac?

Nearly four years after its initial release, it's still hard to succinctly describe exactly what .Mac offers. Apple describes the service on their software page as a way to publish content, backup files and sync data. Interestingly, .Mac's most obvious component, email, is listed as a minor aside halfway down on .Mac features page. Clearly, Apple sees .Mac as something more than just an glorified email account.

It isn't Apple's first attempt to create an online service, either. Before the Internet was commercially popular, Apple built a online service for dealers and developers called AppleLink. It applied the familiar Mac graphic interface on top of GE’s mainframe communication protocols. AppleLink was prohibitively expensive because there was no Internet access available at the time; instead, users had to pay $15 for access charges, and Apple had to pay millions in fees to GE to host the service.

Apple decided to broaden the appeal of their network by copying a consumer dialup BBS network built by Quantum for Commodore 64 users. Apple worked with Quantum to develop a new service with a graphic interface called AppleLink, Personal Edition. Apple later pulled out Quantum renamed it America Online. After AOL took off, Apple decided that it should take another stab, and repartnered with AOL to create a derivative service called eWorld.

AOL and eWorld were also competing against Microsoft's MSN, GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe in a race to create, own, and control users' access to information with online services and Push. The explosion of the Internet eventually killed off all of the dinosaurs, and forced survivors to convert their online services into either an ISP or some type of Internet Portal. Apple's operational meltdown in 1995 prompted eWorld's unplugging entirely.

A few years later, the newly NeXTified Apple announced a new set of Internet services called iTools, built using the WebObjects dev tools that Apple had aquired from NeXT. A WebObjects application is basically a Mac OS X Cocoa application that creates a dynamic HTML interface for remote users.

The free, web-based email and various Mac oriented online services were offered as a loss leader designed to advertise Apple and the Internet savvy new iMac. It was a bad omen that Apple so pointlessly stole the iTools name from an existing Mac developer's popular web interface product, but Apple isn't always known for suave finesse in naming its products. M. Jobs, can you bid adieu to the francophoney names like Exposé, Rendezvous, and Bonjour? Mon dieu!

Apple soon found the advertising and switcher allure of iTools didn't measure up to the cost of hosting it. They rebranded iTools as an anual fee subscription service called .Mac. Being asked to paying for something that was formerly free, regardless of how sensible the service, is difficult to swallow, and Apple often takes some flack for the price: .Mac certainly isn't a steal when compared to the adware available for free from Google, Yahoo! and others.

And as much as I like clever word play, the name .Mac is a bit too much; it has little in common with Microsoft's .NET initiatives (which were named badly enough already). Also, because it starts with a dot it is, depending on the context, either invisible, grammatically retarded, a capitalization conundrum, or of questionable pronunciation.

Despite all that, .Mac is being run as a successful venture, and plenty of people are choosing to pay for it. Apple doesn't seem to really know what to do with the service however. Apple took a brief stab at creating community, with user submitted movie reviews and kid safe web browsing, but that venture failed to fly.

For a while, the main selling point behind .Mac was the bundled Virex software. Virex was such problematic crap that Apple eventually pulled it out. Mac users don't really need to bother with the annoyance of virus scanning anyway, particularly given the high profile blunders of Symantec which have made running virus software on the Mac far more problematic and costly than the dubious value of knowing you are possibly slightly more safe from things that don't exist anyway.

So what is .Mac: an email address and a web hosting service, integrated with a password protected WebDAV server? That doesn't sound competitive when compared with various things you could get free elsewhere.

The real value in .Mac is its integration. Mac OS X allows you to make an offline copy of your WebDAV iDisk, for example. There's automated one-click sharing and publishing from iLife apps, and the sync features and Backup integration with .Mac are clever and simple enough to be actually put to use by mere mortals. Much of the service is so abstract that unless you use it, it's hard to grasp the value of having it.

There is so much more that .Mac could offer though. Apple is uniquely poised to deliver a wide range of new Web 2.0 style services. First I'll explain why, then I'll detail the services Apple needs to start offering.

Ten Reasons Why Apple Can Kickstart Web 2.0

How to Fix .Mac: a Wishlist