.Mac's slow death
Somebody call the ambulance, because .Mac is dying...and Google is the assassin (with a little help from his sidekick Firefox). Now I've been using .Mac since it was free and called "iTools." I was initially lured in by the convenience of iDisk, the mac.com email address and so on.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is an opinion piece, but it lands on ground already broken: GigaOM had asked just six weeks earlier whether dotMAC was due for a makeover, and this writer — a customer since the days when the service was free iTools — concludes the paid bundle of mac.com mail and iDisk storage no longer earns its keep against free rivals.
The timing matters because Google keeps sharpening the contrast: the day before this post, Gmail shipped in-browser MP3 playback of attachments, another feature layered onto a free service that competes directly with what .Mac charges for. Commentary across these pieces treats Google's reach as near-hegemonic — one comparison casts it as the Austrian Empire of Napoleonic-era Europe.
First-order effects
- Apple's .Mac subscribers face a renewal decision between a $99-a-year bundle and free equivalents — webmail, file storage, syncing — that Google and browser-based tools increasingly match.
- Google's Gmail becomes the direct substitute pulling at .Mac's core email-and-storage value proposition, with Firefox making web apps feel native enough that desktop integration matters less.
Second-order effects
- Apple is pushed toward a redesign or repositioning of .Mac rather than incremental tweaks — the makeover question raised in July's GigaOM piece becomes urgent rather than rhetorical.
- Free, ad-supported services set the price anchor for consumer webmail and online storage, forcing any subscription-based rival to justify cost with exclusives rather than basics.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer internet services migrate from paid subscriptions toward advertising-funded platforms, leaving device makers like Apple to compete on integration instead of hosting commodity services.
- Browser-based applications erode the lock-in value of OS-tied services, shifting the competitive line from the desktop to whatever works in any browser.
The trend: Paid consumer web-service bundles are being undercut by free, ad-supported platforms, pushing hardware companies to rethink why their online services exist.