On July 17, 2002 Apple hit iTools users with a bombshell. Steve Jobs proclaimed during his MacWorld Expo keynote, that iTools (a free service that provides email and web site hosting) will be phased out, and replaced with .Mac services at the end of September. In my opinion, this is one of the worst decisions Apple has made in a very long time.

Apple used evidence that Yahoo, Hotmail, and Internet disk space services are now either charging, or have gone out of business. But this isn't completely accurate. Yahoo and Hotmail are only charging users for POP email access (using an email client), they can still get free email services for web based email. As for those free Internet disk space sites, they collapsed because banner ads are not a great source of revenue anymore, and they couldn't keep up with their overhead.

But Apple is different in that it has hardware and software sales, which provide much more revenue than any .Mac service will. In fact, iTools has been a huge hit with new users, because they can easily post pictures, movies, etc. of their families at no extra charge. This was a great marketing strategy that will be totally lost. I think this will only hurt hardware sales, more so than the money coming in from .Mac will make.

So, what do I suggest? I suggest offering users the option to get a scaled down version of .Mac. Possibly with just iDisk space (25 MB is more than enough) and a 5MB email address, for much lower price of $20-$30 per year. I don't need the calendar stuff, backup software (I already bought some), antivirus software (I already bought some), homepage creator, and all the other features of .Mac that are useless to me.

Another suggestion I have is to offer discounted educational pricing. Maybe a continuous $50/year for students and other educational folks. This would allow people like me who are unemployed college students which have already accumulated large debts to get by with a little less money out of our pockets. At the current prices, .Mac is not viable for almost the entire education market.

Also, I would suggest group accounts. In my family, we have three iTools accounts. At the current price of .Mac, that would be $300 every year to keep these active. If Apple would let us do a family or group account where we could have multiple account names, and divide up the space evenly (for 3 people, each user would get 33 MB and 5 MB of email space, and have the possibility to configure it so one user gets more space than the others). At $300/year, we could easily get a good web hosting service, email, and domain names with money left over.

My final suggestion to Apple is to give away .Mac subscriptions to users who either purchase a new Mac, or a copy of Mac OS X. That way, when we buy a new Mac, or Mac OS X, we wouldn't have to turn around and spend another $100 just to get the features of the .Mac services. This would be good for Apple in it would get users hooked with .Mac, and good for users because we could continue to get it for free as long as we buy new copies of OS X or new Macs every year (a viable solution for some).

They way iTools works now is perfect, there is no reason to add all these extra features. I wouldn't mind paying for the current iTools services, but I will NOT pay $99/year for .Mac services. Apple has made a big mistake; hopefully they rectify it before it gets out of hand.

To let Apple know what you think of .Mac, please fill out their feedback form. Additionally, there is a petition online that asks Apple to lower the price of the .Mac services. It's worth a try. Please sign the petition if you feel the same way about the .Mac service pricing.