.Mac Morphs into MobileMe

TidBITS Networking: .Mac Morphs into MobileMe:

Although still costing $99 per year (with a free 60-day trial), the idea is that MobileMe is less a separate service and more of an extension of what you already do on your Mac, PC, iPhone, or iPod touch. For example, your email messages and mailboxes will apparently instantly be the same, whether on your iPhone or your computer, a feature that many users should welcome with open arms. And, contacts and calendar items will sync automatically.

Exactly. While some of the geek pundits are downplaying MobileMe and the cost, they keep listening to the echo chamber and not paying attention to the core market .Mac served and MobileMe is going to dominate. For me, the improvements announced today are wonderful — assuming Apple comes through in delivering AND delivers them in a reliable form.

So I’ll likely give it a few weeks, then hook up a family pack (for myself, Laurie and mom to each have their own environment) and move my email from my hosting service and google over to MobileMe. For something that’s (a) tightly integrated, (b) reliable, (c) works appropriately between the web, my macs (plural), and my iPhone (when I buy it), that’s worth the money.

Yeah, I COULD patch it all together, and in fact, I have for the most part, having used things like gmail, google calendar, google bookmarks, Spanning Sync or Plaxo or whatever… But to pay a few bucks to let someone else do the grunt work and to have a single support contact for everything? let the geeks geek, I want to USE the damn thing, not maintain it.

And this is one of those places where the echo chamber of geekdom falls down badly. It’s never gotten .Mac, and I’m sure .Mac’s going to get ripped for the price (again), lack of social networking tools, etc, etc. What they don’t get is that a huge audience doesn’t care about or want those features. Their idea of social networking is passing around email to church group members and coordinating calendars for play dates and little league, and sending photos to grandma in Sun City.

So Apple’s never gotten much geekcred for .Mac, but keep getting good numbers of happy, paying customers. And now, it takes a quantum leap forward, and starts integrating the cloud into Mac OS X. This opens the door to all sorts of things down the road beyond “exchange for the masses”.

I love it. and I love the new iPhone. Both will be part of my toolbox in the next few months, once they prove themselves out.

To all the folks back at Apple who worked their butts off to build this, way to go. I like it.

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