Hi there,
I heard a rumour from someone at work that they were planning on offering a free version of .Mac in the near future. Is there any truth to this?
It would make sense considering Google are going absolutely mad and giving the World away for free...
Comments
I suspect that the sudden proliferation of networking features (e.g., Back to My Mac) are driving this decision. Mac OS X will be pervasively linked to the cloud, slowly but surely.
It all comes back to whether they can find a way to make it pay for itself. Or maybe they'll just subcontract to Google and let them worry about it.
If they tied it in so you could only get a free account if you owned a Mac (eg sign up with your serial number or something), then there would be another cool reason for getting a Mac.
Most large companies entice people in with a few loss leaders. Why not Apple?
I don't understand. Why don't they do loss leaders? Setting up a server for email as a freebie for Mac users is hardly a huge cost for a company with shares around the $200 mark. They're rolling in it! Publicity alone would be worth more than the service costs for them to run.
If they tied it in so you could only get a free account if you owned a Mac (eg sign up with your serial number or something), then there would be another cool reason for getting a Mac.
Most large companies entice people in with a few loss leaders. Why not Apple?
Because people are continuing to give Apple boat-loads of money without any freebies. From a corporation standpoint, why would they do such a thing? If Apple see drops in sales, then yes, freebies can be used to attract users...
Dave
I don't understand. Why don't they do loss leaders? Setting up a server for email as a freebie for Mac users is hardly a huge cost for a company with shares around the $200 mark. They're rolling in it! Publicity alone would be worth more than the service costs for them to run.
If they tied it in so you could only get a free account if you owned a Mac (eg sign up with your serial number or something), then there would be another cool reason for getting a Mac.
Most large companies entice people in with a few loss leaders. Why not Apple?
Because the way loss leaders work (to the extent that they work) you aren't supposed to buy them. Dell or whoever offers a complete PC with monitor for $399! How many people go to the store to buy it and come out with something that costs $899, or even $1299? That's the whole point. You make enough loss leaders to be able to claim that they exist and you can buy them, and then you upsell to profitable models.
If .Mac becomes free, where is the upsell? Because a free-as-in-beer service isn't a loss leader, it's just a loss.
The problem with making .Mac free is that it is not just about email. You can post photo albums and QuickTime movies. You can back your files up to .Mac and sync computers through .Mac. All of these things eat large amounts of bandwidth and CPUs cycles, and both of those cost real money. The more popular the service becomes, the more it costs not only in bandwidth and existing CPU costs but in server and network upgrades to handle the burgeoning traffic. If the service is bringing in enough money to pay for upgrades that keep it up-to-the-minute it's much more likely to be kept up-to-the-minute. If not, the tens of millions of dollars in costs will have to come out of someone's hide.
The problem with limiting it to just email is Google. So that leaves Apple with their current (successful and profitable, but modest) walled garden, or with divining some way to make money with a free service the way Google and Yahoo! have.
In fact I've decided if they don't do a cheap or free email service by the end of my sub year (October time) then I'm going to have to switch to gmail.
I use Gmail, and make heavy use of Picasa for sharing pictures of the kids with the rest of the family (who the PCs came from) I also use several of the other Google Apps, including the word processor and the calender (recently found a utility which syncs google calender with iCal & it's free)
I'm frustrated to find that I have no way to upload video to my Picasa web albums! I can live without Picasa, although I would use it over iPhoto if it were available. I can understand that I can't use the Apple bundled programs to upload, but I don't understand why what should be just a simple FTP can't be done from the Apple OS, when it's so simple on the PC.
Right now I don't want to pay the $99 for a .Mac account. A) I can't afford it.
So, now I'm left asking for recommendations on a free web-based gallery service, which will hose my photos and videos, with minimal fuss, and a fair degree of privacy (not going to go to facebook/myspace and set up an account there, nor will I put my videos on YouTube.
I have been using photobucket free service for several years now and have never had any problems
I don't post many pictures online, so that's of no use really either. I purchased a Netfirms account, and I use that for all my webhosting/ftp needs. 250GB of storage for $10 (at least for the first year) compared to about $100 for 10GB and a few other services with .Mac. I actually wrote a blog entry expressing my discontent with the whole .Mac concept. For those of you interested, you can take a look here.
If there are more people out there like myself, adding a form of free .Mac accounts would perhaps bring about more of a sense of customer loyalty (though I'm sure it's already pretty high). Eh, just my thoughts.