Posted by gracion:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

– .mac is dead. It’s never worked well (or at all) outside the US, as far as I know. It’s an expensive embarrassment. Apple could close it outright, sell it to Google, or allow people to operate their own sync servers.

Happy New Year, Rainer! Very good summing up of the year, which I agree with, except I’m not sure I want to kill .Mac. Here’s why:

It has a lot to offer as a seamless extension of Mac OS X, especially for nontechnical users. (1) Backup works, is flexible but dead-simple to use. (Yes Time Machine will change all that, sort of). (2) iDisk, ditto. (3) Photo web publishing from iPhoto is again seamless. (3) OS-integrated syncing of a variety of things (room for improvement though) (4) an interesting, already-working API for iDisk access, store-and-forward, and syncing. (5) Amazon discount (6) Comcast, Charter, and other ISPs are starting to blacklist my small independent ISPs mail server willy nilly. .Mac email is my way around these.

One of my very nontechnical Mac user friends had all sorts of trouble doing things until I got them on .Mac. I suspect that is true for a lot of Mac users. Admittedly, I haven’t checked out alternatives. Is there a “GoogleDisk” item I can add to the Go menu in the Finder?

Anyway, I’m looking forward to fun at Macworld, iPhone or noPhone!

Enjoy!