Why the new .Mac suddenly matters

At todays product announcement, Apple .Mac subscribers got a very welcome upgrade to a hefty 10gb of storage and 100gb of monthly transfer.

.Mac (Apple Computer, Inc.)

Why is this such a great thing? Well...

  • Going from 1gb to 10gb is exponentially better, obviously. More storage for files, backups, music, movies, photos...
  • Ah yes, photos. The new Gallery features built-in to iLife 08 are quite breathtaking. But the integration of iPhoto/.Mac with all of the iLife apps, the iPhone and the numerous ways to publish/share/collaborate on images is where the good stuff lies.
  • Did we mention the iMovie integration? Upload a movie from iMovie and create a player gallery, which you can then...
  • publish with iWeb 08, creating what would be a heck of an impressive little web site. In fact, as soon as I get my copy, I'll be moving sm.org over to this, since...
  • .Mac and iWeb 08 now support personal domain hosting, meaning you can take any domain and associate it with your .Mac account.

And that's where things get interesting. Because what was considered (a few short hours ago) to be a waste of $99 annually is suddenly very competitive with the offerings of any major web host - obviously not thinking about some cheesy shared hosting deal where you get 800,000 gb of transfer monthly that no one could ever use while maintaining any level of QoS.

Instead, you're getting a fast, reliable and well integrated website tools for about the same prices as you'd pay for a generic web host.

And to make things even more interesting (NOTE: I'm calling it here first) - what's to stop Apple from integrating a Google Apps level of integration with .Mac and iWork, offering small business a way to run a website, collaborate on documents and communicate effectively (internal jabber anyone?). (Who knows...maybe BGM will move to .Mac too!)

This could be the first step toward what I have always felt would be a Google/Apple merger. But then again, maybe I'm just having a fanboy daydream.

Regardless, todays move into the realms of serious hosting and integration has certainly made .Mac a player in the arena of web apps.

What do YOU think?

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