If .Mac is down, could .Me be far behind?
Apple’s mail service was offline for about five and a half hours Monday night, and a lot of people got very excited.
“.Mac mail down, speculations abound” read the headline on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).
“.Mac outage sparks fresh re-brand rumour” echoed 9to5Mac.
Why the excitement? Because everybody who follows Apple believes that an overhaul of the company’s aging Internet services bundle is imminent. And indeed, one regular at Investor Village reported later that night that a “buddy at Apple” told him that the outage was related to “major server work” and not the irritatingly regular scheduled maintenance.
It’s been more than a year since Steve Jobs, gently rebuked at D5 by the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg for how little Apple (AAPL) has done to develop its $99/year .Mac Internet bundle — especially compared with what Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) now offer for free — promised to do something about it real soon.
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Jobs replied at the time. “And I think we’ll make up for lost time in the near future.”
A few months later, Apple did increase tenfold (to 10 GB) the amount of storage you get for $99, but the rest of the .Mac services — Mail, Backup, Sync, iDisk, etc. — were basically unchanged and growing increasingly long in the tooth.
So with less than a week left before Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference and the keynote speech at which everybody expects Jobs to unveil the new iPhone, at least one Apple watcher thinks his surprise “one more thing” this year might be the successor to .Mac, re-branded for the age of iPhones as .Me.
Why .Me? Saul Hansel at the New York Times’ Bits blog does a good job tracing the genealogy of this particular meme, from .Mac to %@ to Mobile Me to .Me.
Suffice it to say that this may be Apple’s best chance to prove that it really does understand today’s World Wide Web, and that it can do for social networking, cloud computing and online services what it has done in the past for PCs, portable music players and cell phones: put the focus on the user’s experience and make complex technology seem utterly and delightfully transparent.
I hope they don’t make the domain change mandatory… “me.com” sounds nice, but since my email address is my full name, having “@me.com” at the end of it would be a bit pretentious. Don’t you think?
I haven’t had to change my email address for almost 8 years. And I’ve only scratched the surface of iLife integration. But if they would make a “Back to my Mac” client for Windows… Then I wouldn’t have to take my laptop everywhere.
well, I’ll wait until WWDC, but if nothing changes with .mac I’m switching to Google Apps - which costs $50/year at the most.
How about some iWork love on iPhone for WWDC.
That will play nice with .Me
i really hate paying $99 a year for .Mac, especially since i can get most of the services for free and dont use the email, but the automatic online backup is worth the price
Right, cynik. Just what our country needs: more “free” stuff. Since you don’t live here, you clearly don’t understand a thing about us. I’m already paying about $5/month per phone to pay for “free internet access” to all our school kiddies. This tax will undoubtedly never go away, either. Your idea of “free broadband” will have to be paid by someone. I propose a $100/household tax on all Swiss residents for this purpose. Are you up to the task?
iDelays
iExpensive
iShortages
iBottlenecks
iHelpMe!
For sure Apple have got to get their cloud services down. They have some pretty useful mobile platforms just now, they could make great use of the cloud.
They are in a good position to do this. Their development platform was used to make the web itself, their system does networking nicely. But there is still the bottleneck of the available bandwidth, and its cost.
If Obama was for real he’d be offering coast to coast free public broadband.
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
.mac was down due to a massive denial of service attack. It’s a testament to the skills of Apple’s IT people that they were able to get a lid on it in such a short time.