Take a look at all the services you can now get, for free, from Google: news and (my favorite) news alerts, maps, questions answered, catalog search and shopping, package tracking (just type the package number into Google), community groups, image search, local business search, mobile phone version of Google (amazingly handy), scholarly papers search, university-specific search.

There's also Gmail, Blogger, desktop search, photo IM, the Keyhole aerial image catalog, the very nice Picassa photo management tool, toolbars et al. And Google Labs always has a dozen or so interesting new things under development.

Google's business model - placing relevant advertising near the search results - has proven to be a gigantic money-spinner. So they can afford to have an army of really bright people sitting around thinking about and developing cool new free things. .Mac's 9-buck-a-month model probably means Apple can't afford to have the same amount of resources working on .Mac.

So, what would I add to .Mac? More integration of my desktop and .Mac online services. Tiger's Spotlight search tool already includes iDisk, but it should offer an option to go out to Google and Yahoo as well. I'd integrate .Mac with Garage band, so musicians could share their creations. I'd beef up iWork's HTML output and make one-button publish to .Mac, a la iPhoto slide shows. Ditto for iMovie.

I'd add Apple-oriented community features, for example, groups for creative types who are big Mac fans. And I'd start an RSS uber-feed of Apple-oriented news, even from those pesky and interesting sites that Apple is suing. I'd put Apple guides and books online - a la O'Reilly's Safari, where you could rotate titles from a library. I'd up iDisk to 5 GB (my annual subscription would buy a 100 GB hard drive these days, after all) and make it easier for people to share all the photos, movies, newsletters et al. that they are creating with Apple's digital lifestyle tools...
Comments 9:10:40 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures