Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, .Mac
What happened to .Mac?
After all the fuss over the new Mac OS X Leopard features, the rest of today's announcements and the Apple.com site redesign, I finally noticed that .Mac has taken a bit of a back seat on the site, at least for now. Note that along the new minimal site navigation bar at the top of Apple's site, .Mac no longer enjoys its own tab. Apple has of course done some house cleaning and simplified that navigation menu, and .Mac is now a sub-section under the main Mac tab, along with Apple's other Mac hardware and software products, and is featured under the "Why You'll Love A Mac" section. The .Mac link at the very bottom of Apple's pages has been turned into a header, with the Learn More and Log In links broken out -- www.mac.com still works, though, redirecting to apple.com/dotmac.
Keep in mind that the .Mac site was not merely used for product promotion: it also served as the gateway to the web-based .Mac services like Mail, Bookmarks, Address Book, etc. Of course, it could easily be argued that the web-based .Mac services took a major back seat to the applications and features Apple has built into Mac OS X, but still: what could this mean? Jobs recently admitted that .Mac wasn't achieving its full potential and that it was due for an overhaul, so it doesn't quite make sense to assume the service is in any serious trouble. The more likely assumption here is that .Mac is in fact (or at least hopefully) undergoing that overhaul Mr. J mentioned, and that it will regain some prominence at Apple's site once it returns for the next round.
When that will be, of course, is still anyone's guess. There was no real mention of .Mac during today's keynote, nor any mention of its close companion iLife, either. As usual with Apple's quiet attitude towards development, we'll have to play the waiting game to see what becomes of Apple's polarizing web service package.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
dave said 6:23PM on 6-11-2007
There is a login link at http://www.apple.com/mac/
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Gerald Buckley said 6:25PM on 6-11-2007
And "Developer" has been relegated not to the backseat but to the trunk! EEESH!
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Dustin said 6:31PM on 6-11-2007
Don't forget that .Mac Mail has been in trouble for the last couple of days now, without being fixed. The status menu has it as yellow, stating "2% of members are intermittently unable to access .Mac Mail on the web. Normal service will be restored ASAP." What's the deal with that? Is it usual to be out this long, or could that imply some sort of revamp soon? I'm sure it's a long stretch though :(
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Ian Beck said 6:36PM on 6-11-2007
.Mac isn't completely on the outs:
"And now, back to my Mac.
Ever need something on your Mac when you were thousands of miles from home? With Back to My Mac and a .Mac account, you can connect to any of your Macs at home from any Mac on the Internet. Your home computers will appear in the shared section of the sidebar just as they do when you’re in the living room."
From http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/finder.html (accessed June 11, 2007)
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George said 6:39PM on 6-11-2007
Yeah, I was really disappointed by the keynote. Nothing significant was featured as far as I could tell, nothing we really didn't already know from the last one. Find-my-mac or whatever is neat but anemic. One feature I really was looking forward was missing from the presentation and is not on their website either: screen-sharing via iChat (finally a simple way to help my mother from afar).
But then, at the end of the day, still no word on iWork. Still! It's getting crusty. And dot-Mac has been inconsequential for a long time now--I was hoping to hear something revitalizing about it. Again, nothing.
The deafening silence from Inifite Loop wonderful dog food for the hype machine of blogger fanboys doesn't really try to silence, but I grow weary of it.
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Brian said 6:40PM on 6-11-2007
What's also strange is that the .Mac link is grayed out at the bottom of the new "Mac" tab. Hmmm...
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Brian said 6:44PM on 6-11-2007
Oops... the .Mac link isn't grayed out it's just a header for two links leaded to the .Mac minisite. Sorry!
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George said 7:54PM on 6-11-2007
I just wrote that I was disappointed that there's no mention to be found about screen-sharing. However it may still be in there. Now I just watched the video demonstration of Finder on Apple's website, and I noticed that as the demonstrator scrolled through shared computers, some of them showed the option to "Share Screen." I hope that works over the internet and not just on the local network.
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MurphyMac said 6:49PM on 6-11-2007
I wouldn't expect new .Mac stuff until Leopard and/or the new iLife ships.
Example: If they're going to make it all Google-like it will probably feature iPhoto hooks that they wouldn't deploy in an update to the current iPhoto. It would have to be a whole new iPhoto.
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Jon H said 6:50PM on 6-11-2007
.Mac?
How about "I paid my $x for a registered developer membership and all I get is squat".
I guess that new MacBook Pro *can* wait until Christmas, after all.
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mitch said 7:33PM on 6-11-2007
i still think that .mac could be a powerful tool for the iPhone - syncing addresses bookmarks etc. Was surprised that .mac didn't get a full mention today
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Nicholas Arvanitis said 7:27PM on 6-11-2007
My guess is we'll see a new .mac, iLife and iWork 2008 with the release of Leopard.
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Arlo said 7:53PM on 6-11-2007
Also:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/dashboard.html
Widgets wherever.
Get yourself a .Mac account and your Dashboard widgets can follow you from Mac to Mac. With Dashboard syncing in Leopard, every widget you add on one Mac automatically updates on all your Macs.
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Chris said 8:12PM on 6-11-2007
I was finally able to dump my .mac...paid half for webhosting and email, and bought a backup program. It's not worth it.
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Leonardo said 10:09PM on 6-11-2007
They dropped iCard from .Mac.
I don't subscribe to iMac, but even before being a Mac user I was always visiting .Mac for sending webcards.
I will really miss iCards...
:-(
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Ben the Dog said 9:47PM on 6-11-2007
Have to agree with most of the above sentiments. .Mac is the proverbial elephant in the room. Overpriced compared to other email / hosting options, and suffers from a fair bit of downtime. Publishing from iWeb is not without its problems either (just check out the iWeb forums).
I'm one of the lucky ones - I have 6 months left on .Mac, so I can slowly phase out my .mac email address, but if something groundbreaking happens in October with iLife + .Mac then I can hang onto it if needed.
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GW said 1:00AM on 6-12-2007
@ #16
You can still get to the iCards page with this (at least from the UK anyway)
http://www.mac.com/WebObjects/iCards
hope this helps
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Jonathan Baldwin said 3:03AM on 6-12-2007
.Mac was featured pretty heavily considering. I mean, the whole networking thing was a great feature and I can see it being useful to me - my .Mac sub seems better value for money.
On the whole keynote thing, I think people are confusing a developers' conference with one aimed at a wider audience. The features presented here were ones that affect developers - the shiny stuff, the consumer stuff (like iLife) can wait until October.
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Matteo said 3:27AM on 6-12-2007
@Jonathan Baldwin
I would agree with your view in principle. But the WWDC 2007 was expected to deliever more. Particularly on the iLife side. You said the one in San Francisco is a developer conference. Well... Apple just redesigned their entire web site! They announced the iPhone release date. These are things that have an impact on the "wider audience" you are talking about... Whereas a complete set of features for the new iLife or iWork would be much more of interest to developers, as they would be able to write plug-ins for these softwares. I think developers don't care that much if Apple redesigns it's own website, or if they announce the release date of the iPhone...
My opinion is that this conference was a mix (not a good one) between "developers' stuff" and "consumer stuff". At least as far as the Keynote is concerned.
DotMac should be priced lower and offer more useful stuff. (Edit documents on the fly from NON MAC computers, access a Mac from a NON MAC (sort of "reverse bootcamp"). That would be appealing, not things that (my humble opinion) one can get free from Google or similar...
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Jonathan Baldwin said 1:04PM on 6-12-2007
Matteo
You have to ask yourself who 'expected' more. It was the rumour sites and us. We built up the expectations and then felt cheated. Our fault. Developers just want to know about what affects them.
AS for the web site, well taht makes sense from a branding point of view - new OS, new site (the old one was looking out of date) and if you take a look there you'll see a lot of things discussed that the keynote didn't.
The iPhone section makes sense because developers wanted to know if they could write apps for it, and now they can.
I'm not saying I wasn't disappointed - when he got to feature 4(?) and it was Spaces I knew I could go and make a cup of tea.
But I watched the keynote today and you know what? The new Finder and desktop features are pretty neat - that preview feature is going to be *very* useful to me, as is 'back to my Mac'. Sure, an iLife announcement would have been good, as would a new version of Keynote, but speaking with my 'marketing expert' hat on, it wouldn't have made a lot of sense to tell developers about Garageband and iWeb.
Incidentally, the Safari announcement made the BBC News headlines... ;-)
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