A bit of .Mac pushback
In the year I owned my Mac Powerbook, I never gave in to the temptation and advice of friends to sign up for .Mac. It wasn’t just the hefty price tag, but also the sense that the entire suite felt very much Web 1998, ala AOL. All-in-one service with mediocre individual offerings, poor speed, and no real commitment by the vendor (AOL then or Apple now) to make the service win on anything other than the “one-stop-shop” value proposition.
It seems my reaction is more common than I thought – over on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) they have kicked off a Web petition to try and get Apple to acknowledge the problem and commit to improving the .Mac experience and product offering. It reads:
With competing all-in-one services taking on .Mac, and plenty of individual services offering far superior performance in contrast to their .Mac equivalents (often for free), you are quickly losing any appeal or value. Your fall from the throne isn’t merely a result of your apparent disinterest in pushing the boundaries of web services, for it is also caused by your blatant and persistent lack of the basic fundamentals in much of what you offer.
Easily dwarfed storage space, an insulting lack of server-side spam filtering, and competing syncing services that outpace yours in terms of both platform compatibility and innovative features – all top an extensive list of snowballing frustration and complaints from a decreasing community of .Mac users from far and wide. We encourage you to seek out the mounting and disenchanting feedback across the internet from your users, only because it seems that you have recently forgotten this crucial practice.
Please, if you insist on charging for these aging services, start placing a refreshed effort into them so users have something to show for paying your chart-topping yearly fee. Apple is a company known for thinking different and innovating – it’s time .Mac begins living up to that ideal again.
TUAW also publish a “.Mac is dying” piece that compares Google+Firefox against the offering from Apple. It ain’t pretty. This is exactly the situation where an open, honest dialogue via a .Mac team or individual employee blogger and the community of .Mac users and critics would be invaluable – for mutual understanding, to show the community that their feedback is being heard and put to good use, and to share any plans to address the problems (if they exist).
So where is that blog?
