Women in Technology

Article:		Dissecting .Mac
Subject:		It's a Hosting Service
Date:		2002-07-30 18:53:46
From:		charliebrown
What I would like to see is a pricing comparison chart. I've never looked into pricing with other vendors, but I believe there's nothing here that isn't offered elsewhere. I can only assume that for all you get - web, email, 100MB storage, calendar - $99/year is competitive and fair. (As far as I know, a comparable service is not free anywhere. Feel free to show me where I'm wrong!) Apple's added value is the smooth integration with OSX. Here's what would concern me. How high is the switching cost if I decide to switch vendors? Mail.app works with any ISP. Will iCal and iDisk Utility also be workable with any other vendor? That might be too much to ask for, so I would be cautious when making .Mac my "home away from home" and conscious of not developing too tight a dependence on it.

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• Re: It's a Hosting Service
  2002-07-30 19:19:10  Michael Brewer | [View]
  
  
  You raise some valid points. I may look into doing a comparison chart--although the brief, completely unscientific research I did on this (before deciding whether or not to plunk down $50) showed Apple doing rather well.
  
  From everything I have heard, iCal should be able to retain (at least) most of its functionality on any WebDAV resource. We'll have to wait until Jaguar is available to know for sure. Apple has really impressed me with its adherence to open standards as of late, and I think it would be in their best interest to keep them in mind when developing .Mac services and applications.
  
  I don't see iDisk Utility working with other providers' WebDAV resources any time soon. It simply isn't configurable enough at this point in time to do that, and it wouldn't make sense for Apple to spend time making it so. If you're going with a third party they would probably have a Web interface for the same sort of functionality. And if you're providing WebDAV, you'll have your own configuration methods depending on the daemon used.