The Big .Mac Mystery

On the heels of the WWDC next week, comes news of a possible, ever-so-slight shift in strategy on the part of Apple. From the New York Times Bits Blog:

...there is a flurry of speculation about improvements to a minor icon an the Apple Pantheon: the .Mac online service. For six years, .Mac has been a $100 a year bundle of handy Internet services, now including e-mail, online hosting, backup, photo sharing, and tools to synchronize calendars and address books. Industry reports say Apple has between 1 million and 2 million subscribers."

"Now is certainly a great time to expand and rename .Mac. Much of the energy in software development is around online applications, which would be a logical evolution for Apple’s iLife and iWork software. Moreover, the iPhone and iPod Touch are particularly suited to services that blend small local applications with storage and other processing handled on an Internet server.

I find this analysis much more consistent with my own than with Forrester Research's speculation about Apple's shift towards home entertainment services. The gorgeously designed, yet deceptively useful devices that are entering the marketplace courtesy of Jobs et al are all but useless without some hefty services to make them sustainably unique.

As an example, I was aghast to discover that I couldn't directly subscribe to a podcast on my iPhone, with Apple preferring me to sync through iTunes on the desktop. There is a third-party app that will let me download and listen to podcasts over my data or WiFi connection, but Apple does not natively support it... This is due, I believe, to Apple wanting to maintain control over what content enters its media player. A .ME service suite (with a web-service-based iTunes) will take us a long way towards the ubiquity of service that Mr. Hansell is speaking about.

Will Steve Jobs Set Me Free? - NY Times Bits

So I've been wondering...

...What is Apple's strategy with Safari, exactly?

Really... I mean with Firefox, Opera, IE, and others, what's the reason that Apple is aggressively entering the Browser wars? Marc Andreesen can tell you that IE is a monster to compete with, and Firefox is whomping butt in the space.

The other day, it struck me: Apple's pattern has thus far been to take open-ish standards, re-brand them and then build services around them. The examples are many: iTunes/iPod (mp3), iMovie/Quicktime (MOV/MPEG-4), iDVD (DVD), Airport(802.11x) - the list goes on.

Why a browser? Because a browser is, and this is important, just another kind of media player. If Apple wants to create an end-to-end new media publishing platform (and they seem to want to), they don't want to depend upon other platforms to support the technologies and engineering they want to apply in displaying their services.

OK, so Web2.0 is the 'platformization' of the Web. Services are delivered as web applications that deliver value through the 'cloud' in other channels. Those other channels include IPTV (AppleTV, XBOX, Wii) Mobile (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.), desktop apps (Adobe AIR, iPhoto), and so on. Consider YouTube: I can upload a video to YouTube, and it will almost instantly appear (formatted correctly) for each of these mediums!

Safari is Apple's play at creating a walled garden for their own (and their partners') web applications.

Then I saw this; an Apple patent for improving the online shopping experience by delivering more in-store-like eCommerce applications.

This would allow you to see what products people are looking at, and by clicking on one of the other visitor icons, customers could even ask questions to users about why they'd left one product or gone to another product. This visual representation can be used to help with live real-time changes in interest:

It looks like (and it really looks like) Apple is going to use Safari as a primary point of introduction to deliver Web2.0 services to their other devices. .Mac is already doing it! You can edit and organize photos in iPhoto that are then uploaded to .Mac (in addition to Facebook, Flickr, and others); you can edit and polish a video in iMovie and upload it to .Mac; you can create a Website and blog in iWeb to upload to .Mac; you can even create a compelling and moderately interactive video in Keynote and export it to Flash for inclusion in a .Mac Website!

All of this points to a circling of the Wagons around the big Long Tail brass ring: Democratized tools for producing and distributing user-generated media in the same platform and locus of the hit-driven stuff. The question remains to be seen: Will this play, and will users see the value. Moreover, will this lead to greater Mac, iPod, and iPhone sales, or will people demand that Apple 'open up?'