Paul Jacobson

I’ve had a MobileMe account for the last year and a half (pretty much since MobileMe launched as the .Mac replacment) and the time has come to renew it. I was initially going to renew my subscription (€65 or around R730 for the year) and I wonder now if I should.

The main appeal MobileMe has had for me is the ability to sync my contacts and calendars with a cloud-based service that comes pretty close to my MacBook experience. I initially used the photo and video sharing service and stopped that in favour of my long-standing Flickr account, Vimeo and Facebook (although I prefer keeping Flickr and Vimeo as my primary photo and video sharing services rather than Facebook). I was briefly tempted to can my Flickr Pro account but quickly realised it is a far better photo sharing service than MobileMe is.

I started using iDisk to backup my data (the 20GB allocation on MobileMe is quite a bit) and although it proved to be a bit of a pain to backup to the service (connections kept dropping), it was reasonably effective as a way to gain access to key files online. I started exploring Jungle Disk and decided to use that as a primary cloud-based backup service and because it runs on Amazon S3 (I’ve linked it to my S3 account) it costs me about $2 a month for the basic service plus my data usage at about $0.15/GB stored and $0.10/GB uploaded). I currently have about 18GB backed up and intend backing up a fair amount more than that going forward. A total backup would cover about 190GB at the moment.

I have also started using Dropbox for smaller file transfers and backups and the free account I am using comes with 2GB of storage. Dropbox is pretty competitive when it comes to larger amounts stored compared to Jungle Disk. The 50GB service costs about $10/month and a similar amount uploaded and stored would work out to about $12.50 just to get the data up to S3. You still add the basic $2 fee to that for Jungle Disk. Of course once the data has been transferred the monthly cost drops to about $7/50GB which isn’t too bad. A total backup of pretty much all my media and documents would probably cost me just under $20 a month to store using Jungle Disk (not counting the initial transfer cost).

Now when it comes to my calendars and email, I use a combination of Gmail and Google Apps accounts and keep my Mac synchronized using Snow Leopard’s Exchange support. The only downside here is that I can only keep one contacts list sync’d at a time online and on my N97. I don’t see how to keep multiple Google contacts lists sync’d using my MacBook’s address book. I run my email using IMAP so my email accounts are sync’d between my phone, the Web and my MacBook.

Ok, so putting all that into some sort of perspective, here are the options I am using:

Of course the chart is simplified. Dropbox and Jungle Disk can also serve as photo and video storage services (and do). Dropbox could also theoretically serve as a photo and video sharing service too but there are better tools. I also haven’t mentioned other media sharing services like Picasa, Zoopy, Blip.tv and others. I just prefer using Flickr and Vimeo at the moment for what they do.

Now, if I don’t renew my MobileMe subscription I lose iDisk (and along with the option of retrieving stuff stored there via a planned iPod Touch or possibly a future iPhone); the calendar and contacts synchronization that so closely parallels my desktop experience and the generally excellent level of Mac integration. I also save myself the €65 cost. I just wonder if I am being penny wise, pound foolish by dropping MobileMe.

What do you think?

Update: When it came down to crunch time I decided to renew my subscription. I am a little ambivalent about my choice but a couple considerations tipped me over the edge:

• The prospect of losing my username and having to come up with yet another one – I am trying to be as consistent as possible with account usernames for various reasons;
• MobileMe may well feature a little more prominently in my future when I upgrade either to an iPod Touch or to an iPhone (jury still out on this one although I am tending towards an Android phone one day) so it makes sense to keep the account; and
• While not a key issue, MobileMe-Mac integration is brilliant and not to be taken too lightly if there are other reasons to hang on to the account.

I haven’t seen this much hype about a Google product since Gmail launched a few years ago. Invitations to use Google Wave have been trickling out to eager users for a couple weeks now and I managed to secure one thanks to Gavin Magid who sent me one of his invites. Like many of you, I watched the demonstration video a while ago and I have been pretty excited about Wave since then although probably not for the same reasons you may have been excited about it.

Wave was touted as a replacement for email and a cure for world hunger almost from the beginning. This has created some really unrealistic expectations, more in the minds of email addicts than people fighting world hunger (unlike the email addicts, they knew immediately Wave wasn’t going to fix world hunger). I know some people have said that the Rasmussens said that Wave would replace email but I don’t remember that (Lars Rasmussen did tell the Wall Street Journal that Wave is a modern version of email though). What I do remember is how they demonstrated that Wave could revolutionise how we collaborate. Unfortunately there is so much hype about this “email replacement” that there has been a fair amount of negativity about the actual product now that more and more people have had a chance to work with it. Scoble initially took a pretty dim view of Wave (also be sure to read his follow up post about how the email metaphor is unhelpful) although I think he pretty much summed up Wave’s value (in my opinion, at least) when he said the following:

See, the first thing you notice is that you can see people chatting live in Google Wave.

That’s really cool if you are working on something together, like a spreadsheet or a Word document.

But it’s a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people.

It also ignores the productivity gains that we’ve gotten from RSS feeds, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

His focus on Wave as a social networking tool is representative of a number of perspectives I have come across already. A couple people I have been testing Wave with have commented on Wave’s value as a Twitter replacement (Really? Is Twitter really something every vaguely similar tool has to replicate?). I think those people are missing the point, just like their email focussed colleagues.

That being said, Wave can replace email for our collaboration oriented tasks. I see Wave as a potential Google Docs+ service. While it lacks decent text formatting tools at the moment (ok, remember Google Wave is still very much a preview version at the moment and is actively being developed and improved) I see this as being a terrific way to collaborate in a team on a document or project. Like Louis Gray, I don’t see Wave being suitable for mass communication, it just gets way too crazy and will only take more time just trying to track multiple branches of conversation threads. Here is a quick demo I made which will give you an idea how chaotic a wave can become:

I’m still messing around with Wave and the product is clearly still in early days but I can see this becoming a tremendously helpful collaboration tool in my business. I work with people in different cities and countries and having Wave available through Google Apps would enable us to collaborate both realtime and asynchronously pretty effectively. Bear in mind that Google Docs already has collaboration functionality built into it (heck, Google Docs is designed around collaboration) but Wave just does it so much better based on what I’ve seen.

I mentioned the debate about Wave as an email replacement earlier in this post. I don’t agree with that characterization when it comes to run of the mill email. Email is built on well established standards and is pervasive. Wave is built on a mix of open protocols and what seems to be a new set of protocols (I could be wrong here) and while Wave is meant to be federated, you’re basically asking people to roll out support for a new infrastructure to replace email where the benefits for certain types of email are not clear.

On the other hand I do see Wave as replacing email for some forms of collaboration. Just like wikis had the potential to change email behaviour by presenting opportunities to collaborate on documents and projects on the wiki rather than using loads of emails, Wave has a similar promise. In fact it is probably more useful to think of Wave as being more like a combination of a wiki and a document service than email per se. Email is really a means to communicate ideas, changes to documents and so on. Wave is where you can actually do all that work without using email as an intermediary.

Now what Wave may have been intended for and what people actually use it for are two very different things. Twitter wasn’t meant to be a chat service and yet that is exactly what we have been using it for (well, in addition to the other stuff). If you are planning to use Wave to replace Twitter or have rampant email conversations with loads of people you are going to become pretty frustrated pretty quickly. If you are planning to use Wave for focussed collaboration then you are on to something.

Ultimately we are going to have to wait a little longer to see how Wave impacts on our activities online. The “new, shiny” quality will fade soon enough and if it doesn’t help us become more productive it will quickly fall by the wayside. I don’t think it will but I do think that, despite all the hype, Wave will probably become a little like Gmail and Google Docs and part of our workflow wallpaper. Its probably better that way too. I don’t want to focus too much on the tool but rather on the work it helps me get done that much better.

I really like the “Getting Things Done” methodology and while I am still reading the book I think I have picked up enough of the methodology to create a fairly workable productivity workflow. The methodology itself is fairly straightforward and the challenge is making a concerted effort to do what you need to do to integrate it into your day to day life. You can implement GTD using a couple folders, pen and paper but I like to have everything digital so my weapon of choice is OmniFocus. I bought a single license about a year ago for $79 (I was silly, I should have bought a pre-release license for a lot less) and that investment makes it worthwhile spending time with OmniFocus getting it working for me.

I’ve just spent a little time this morning looking at how I have been using OmniFocus (or not, which is the problem). I started by watching an introductory video I have in iTunes (don’t know where that specific video is online but here are the OmniFocus tutorials). I have a number of folders, projects and tasks in OmniFocus already but when I opened OmniFocus in the past my eyes just glossed over and that isn’t very good. The system you use to manage your tasks needs to be user friendly and even fun if you are going to keep going back to it.

I noticed that one of the things I was doing was creating folders for specific clients, unhelpfully labelled projects within the folders and then all my tasks. I decided to change that straightaway and ditched my old folders and poorly named projects and created new ones. One of the things I was doing in the past and which I am now remedying is that instead of treating projects as overall goals, I just gave them case names. This was a little too bland and non-descriptive so I have given them names as if they are goals (which they are, really) and all the tasks in those projects are the incremental steps towards achieving the goal (as I understand it, this is the whole idea). As you can see the from the image to the right, I created a little demo project to show you how I am setting up my projects and tasks. Please feel free to give me pointers. The screenshot below is what you’ll find in the project “Show Steve the light”:

I don’t know if I am describing the tasks well enough so it is very much a work in progress. OmniFocus is fairly flexible and I am still messing around with perspectives and views to get my lists set up in a way that works for me. I am also about a year overdue on a decent review session so I am going to set aside a couple hours to sit and do that. Working as an attorney makes it vital to be on top of what is going on in my files because there are a number of things I need to deal with and many of those are time sensitive. The time sensitive tasks go into my calendar (I can schedule stuff in OmniFocus but I’m not sure I want to put those tasks there … what do you do?) and the general tasks will go into OmniFocus.

I think the big challenge, for me at least, is developing the discipline to look at OmniFocus when my day begins and keep referring back to it as the framework for my daily activities. While I have a fetish for developing these sorts of systems, my challenge is remaining engaged in the systems I develop. I also get a little lost in developing the systems and I forget to actually get the work done. Creating a new GTD workflow isn’t the same as actually getting that stuff done.

I thought I’d just share some of my thoughts about this as I go here. Please feel free to share any tips, tricks and processes that work for you. I am still pretty new at this and am always interested in ideas that can help me become more productive.

I had an interesting thought experiment a week or two ago when I considered the effect of the recent MacBook range price hike combined with prolonged service and maintenance cycles on individuals and businesses that may be considering or are running on Macs. The new MacBook is gorgeous. It seems to be everything it is advertised to be (although there are already reports about faults but I am sure those will be resolved soon enough). The problem is that Mac prices are becoming prohibitive and the hassle involved in rectifying faults could make Macs too costly to use in a business environment or even in a personal context where you can’t be without a computer for days on end.

When it comes to price the cost of a MacBook has jumped quite a bit. The top of the line black MacBook used to cost around R15 000 (at least that is what I paid for my MacBook a few months ago). The price for the top of the line MacBook is now closer to R20 000. Bear in mind that Apple typically keeps the prices for new models pretty much the same as the models they replace so a price jump of around R5 000 is pretty significant.

I had to take my wife’s MacBook in to have its hard drive replaced (again). I took it to C3 (I won’t take it anywhere else) who frequently find themselves facing long lead times from their suppliers (if there is a drive in stock it will take 3 to 4 days, if not you could be looking at a week or two). This time around they processed warranty claims (my MacBook’s drive was also failing so we ordered a replacement for that too although I could continue working with it) and hit a snag when Apple’s warranty claim processing system crashed and this necessitated a further delay. If this has been my MacBook and I didn’t have an alternative I would have been about a week and a half to 2 weeks without a computer and the ability to do the bulk of my work. That is a serious setback for a small practice like mine.

This whole thing got me thinking about what I would do if I couldn’t have a Mac. If my MacBook explodes in a puff of coloured smoke, my insurers will pay out its value when I bought it and that would put a true replacement out of reach (unless I shell out the extra few grand). Would it be worth my while to source even more cash to cover that extra cost? What else could I rely on?

I suppose one option is to go back to a Windows machine but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. The last time I tried to work with a Windows machine it didn’t go well and I wound up reformatting the machine and loading Ubuntu. From that point the machine served me pretty well. I didn’t have all the software I had become accustomed to on my Mac (and there weren’t many comparable apps available for Ubuntu either) but the laptop I was using worked well for me. Although I was grateful to return to a Mac (in the form of my current MacBook), I left the Ubuntu laptop with a distinct sense that in a world without Mac, I would be an Ubuntu user.

I recently updated to the latest Ubuntu release on my home PC (which presently exists to run my Windows based accounting software). I have partitioned the hard drive and dual boot into Windows and Ubuntu. The latest release seems to be even better than the last and although there are still usability issues (for me at least) compared to my Mac, I can’t think of a better platform for people who don’t have particularly intricate requirements of their PC, certainly not home users and most business users. Big advantages for Ubuntu users include a free and robust operating system and the capability to support older hardware with seemingly better performance than modern hardware running the latest operating systems. In addition, most of the software you would need comes with the install and there are truckloads of more free software available through a greatly simplified software installation system that is part of the OS.

That being said there are a couple reasons I am not exactly rushing to install Ubuntu on my Mac and turn my back on Apple. The big barrier to entry for me is the paucity of Mac class (or available for Linux) software like the OmniGroup’s products, Circus Ponies’ Notebook (which I have returned to in a big way), Adobe Acrobat (the full version), Transmit and so on. The cost, in terms of money and time, of developing an alternate set of workflows could be just as high as coughing up the extra few grand to buy a new and more expensive Mac so at this point it is not an easy thought experiment to process and resolve.

Although derivatives like Ubuntu do make it a lot easier for an average user to use a Linux system, the Linux development community may want to put more effort into dropping the barrier to entry by focussing on things like UI, ease of use and developing a comparable range of software to that found on current Windows and Mac systems. My (limited) sense of the Linux development community is that it has probably spent a little too much time on the fringes and not enough time developing for the mainstream. If that is the case then it is pretty short sighted. Just looking at what Canonical is doing with Ubuntu and specific projects like the Mobile Internet Device edition I can see a time when the Linux platform is in widespread use simply because of its widespread applicability and how it can manifest on a variety of devices while maintaining a high level of interactivity and functionality. Think an Ubuntu laptop working in tandem with an Ubuntu MID rather than the far more limited MacBook/iPod Touch/iPhone pairing. Linux implementations can (and are) bringing powerful functionality to modest hardware today and the potential for more is tremendous but it needs to be a no brainer for us simple people trained on Windows and Mac OS.

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I saw that LinkedIn had collaborated with CommonCraft to produce a video explaining LinkedIn. It looks like a goodie and certainly presents an interesting perspective of the service to me.

If you check out the post on the LinkedIn blog talking about the video, you’ll notice that they split the video into two parts and posted the two parts to YouTube:

Note, that we’ve also split the video into two parts so that you can just share a specific section if you want— the first part is an overview of what LinkedIn is and the second video is all about how LinkedIn works …

While you’re at it, take a look at other Common Craft videos at their Blip.tv channel.

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business networking, common craft, linkedin, tutorial, video

I’ve been obsessing a little about .Mac/MobileMe for a week or so now and while my original thought was that it is too expensive given what is available already (for example, Google Apps, Plaxo and Spanning Sync), I am starting to see a lot of potential for someone like me … ok, for me. As a starting point this is my current set up:

• I use Gmail (normal and the Google Apps version) for my personal and work email – almost 7GB storage space for each of my 3 or 4 active accounts for free
• Google Docs is great for document sharing – free
• Plaxo keeps my contacts and calendars synchronised and backed up and keeps me up to date with my contacts’ changing details (it is also my preferred lifestream service because it both aggregates my content and presents a public contact point with my various details) – $49.95 for a year if I remember correctly (I am a premium subscriber because I have more than 1 000 contacts and want some of the premium services like De-Duper)
• I also bought a license to use Spanning Sync to synchronise my iCal calendars with Google Calendar – $25 for a year at a time (you can also pay $65 for a perpetual license)
• I am a Flickr Pro member and upload all my photos to Flickr to be shared with everyone – $24.95 a year for 2GB of bandwidth and access to all my photos I ever uploaded in full resolution
• Vimeo gives me 250MB of storage space a week for my personal videos; Viddler limits each video size to 500MB with no limit on the number of videos
• Amazon S3 is awesome for online file storage and it is insanely cheap but I am still looking into using it more extensively for online file storage and backup – I am paying a few cents a month at the moment for the data I uploaded.

So what I have in this bundle is a really good email system (the online interface has far better search and filtering capability than Mail.app in my limited experience) that I access via IMAP. Plaxo does a great job keeping me up to date and keeping my contacts synchronised and I am a big fan of Flickr. Nothing seems to come close to Flickr. I have been using Spanning Sync on and off and Charlie offered to help me iron out the issues I have been experiencing. I reinstalled it recently and still seemed to spend more time fixing synching conflicts (probably because I have Address Book synching with Gmail, Plaxo and Address Book/iCal synching and then Spanning Sync trying to sync between Address Book and iCal and my Google Account) so I set Spanning Sync to manual for the time being. With all the stuff I have installed and available to achieve what I am trying to achieve, I am spending almost $100 a year.

What I would like to be able to do, ideally, is:

• have a fully synchronised and backed up address book and set of calendars;
• be able to share my calendars with my wife and other people, being able to choose whether to share event information or simply free/busy information and
• share my media content and files online as an alternative to constantly emailing documents around (I do a lot of this using Basecamp which I am not including in this little analysis).

So far this set up works reasonably well. Plaxo Pulse is supposed to be able to synchronise with a host of other services including Google and Yahoo! (in theory obviating something like Spanning Sync) but I find that it really only mirrors my local stuff well on Plaxo itself. I haven’t had a really satisfying result synchronising Plaxo stuff with my Google Account. I have multiple calendars in iCal and I want to retain that structure in my online versions. Plaxo preserves my structures on Plaxo itself but sharing is limited to all or nothing last time I tried to figure it out. Google Calendar is a far better option for online scheduling but I haven’t had amazing experiences with Spanning Sync (for whatever reason – to be fair to the Spanning Sync people, I haven’t spent much time troubleshooting with them). My address books have been easier to keep in sync though. As for my content, Flickr is great for photo sharing and I have plenty of space to spare.

When it comes to document sharing, iDisk will enable simple file uploads and sharing. The one benefit of the iDisk option is the ability to backup generally forgotten items like your mail preferences, keychain settings and so forth. When it comes to strightforward documents, there is limited storage available on iDisk but not enough to be terribly meaningful if your goal is to backup more than the items in your Documents folder. If you want to store large amounts of data (say your iTunes library or iPhoto library) then you are better off using something like Amazon S3 for online storage (although the cost of the upload itself if prohibitive in South Africa given our bandwidth costs). Storing a decent iTunes library of, say, 50GB will set you back about $7.50 a month for US-based storage. Google Docs is great for collaborating on documents wiki style but not ideal for simply storing and sharing documents without alternation. There is also Google Sites but there is a limit of 100MB worth of storage space there. I said I wouldn’t delve into Basecamp but that is the best general project collaboration service I have come across. I have 10GB of secure and segmented collaboration and storage space for $49 a month. My clients love it and it is well worth the cost.

Now.Mac/MobileMe offer baked in Address Book and iCal synchronisation, IMAP-based email, web galleries for photos and video (although iMovie simplifies the upload process for YouTube users, I prefer Vimeo for personal videos and Viddler for work related content – just the same here is an example of a video on .Mac and the same video on Vimeo) and disk storage space for online storage and sharing. There are a few other bits and pieces to .Mac but these are the major features. At the moment .Mac is transitioning to MobileMe and the 10GB of shared storage space is increasing to 20GB for an annual $99 fee. This space can be upgraded to 40GB or 60Gb for an additional $49 or $69 respectively. In contrast I can upgrade my Google Account for quite a bit less per year. I am just not sure how available Google Checkout is to us here in South Africa. I am pretty sure we can at least part with our money using Google Checkout for payments.

Storage on your Google Account works pretty much the same as storage on .Mac/MobileMe. The storage space you have by default on Google is limited when it comes to Picasa in particular (it works out to roughly 1GB) and upgrading storage using this option drastically expands your overall storage for a lot less than MobileMe offers.

Benefits of using .Mac include integration with .Mac built right into your Mac apps with synchronisation happening through iSync automatically (if you want that). This kind of system-wide integration can make a noticeable difference when you compare the synchronisation with services that try to convert fields and formats to non-Mac services (doesn’t happen too often but it can be a bit frustrating when it does). MobileMe will add push contacts, push calendar and push email which basically sends your new mail, contacts and scheduling information to each of the devices you have connected to your MobileMe service, whether those devices be an iPhone, iPod Touch, Mac or PC running Outlook. This service probably won’t be of much use to someone running Linux or something other than Mail.app/iCal/Address Book or Outlook.

I did come up with a way to use .Mac (and presumably MobileMe) to effectively synchronise iCal with Google Calendar. You can publish your iCal calendars to .Mac and, in the process, produce an .ics calendar feed. You can import this calendar feed into Google Calendar if you want to have the calendar available there for some or other reason. MobileMe will feature an iCal-like calendar interface online which might make this sort of process irrelevant for MobileMe users. This trick would be more useful if you could then elect whether to share event details or free/busy information on Google Calendar but the only re-sharing option seems to be the imported feed detail.

If you ignore the cost of MobileMe, the service is great. It enables you to synchronise a lot of your important data but given the storage space limits you would probably need another storage solution for all your files if you tend to generate more than the average home or have sizable libraries that need to be backed up. When you factor in the $99 price tag MobileMe is overpriced despite the limitations of the alternatives and the lack of the kind of integration .Mac/MobileMe provides. At a quarter of the price MobileMe would be a no-brainer. At half the price it is feasible but at the current price it is just price gouging and Mom and Pop Homeowner are getting shafted for the sake of ease of use. One thing .Mac has and which I suspect MobileMe will have in abundance is better ease of use. You add your credentials to your system preferences, tell iSync when to do its thing and get on with everything else. If only all the other solutions worked so seamlessly. Once that ceases to be the main issue for you, .Mac/MobileMe ceases to be the best solution.

Synching issues aside, Google’s various offerings seem to be the best option. Google’s mail is brilliant, Google Cal works as well as iCal for the most part, Google Docs is a great way to collaborate on documents and Picasa is a pretty decent photo sharing service that integrates well into a Mac or PC using a download. The best photo sharing service is probably still Flickr but if you want to keep everything inhouse and pay one bill, Google has most of what you would need. If you upgrade your storage for your Google Account, Google Sites may even address that file storage issue.

Update: I finally decided to go for .Mac despite my conclusion in this post. What persuaded me was the way .Mac synchronises my contacts and calendar so easily and enables me to share my calendars with my wife without any sort of Web kung fu. I am not really using my .Mac (soon to be me.com) email address having just migrated my personal mail to a new Gmail address (the migration worked out really well, thanks to how Gmail handles POP mail access) so that may or may not be a factor. I may change my mind later about the mail service. For the most part this is about syncing and backing up my key data in another location.

For some reason Spanning Sync hasn’t really worked out for me as well as it does for other people I speak to so I will probably not re-subscribe next year. My syncing solution does still include Plaxo because Plaxo does more than just backup my contacts and calendar, there is the De Duper which alone has saved me hours of pain and anguish.

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Dear Uncle Steve

Like half of Mac-dom I was keenly following each and every update posted on the Web during the recent WWDC. I even downloaded the video of your Stevenote just in case the coverage I watched missed something important. I drank deeply of the KoolAid that night and was determined to wait my turn for an iPhone 3G, until a day or two later when your narcotic wore off.

Last night I decided to try another of the seemingly fabulous items you announced: MobileMe. At least I decided to try out that 60 free trial of .Mac which, according to all reports, will soon be reborn into MobileMe.

Signing up was really easy and, at first, there was quite a thrill as I starting to plug all my applications into .Mac and watched everything sync with everything else in the background. I even got myself another email address (not quite the one I wanted but one that works). It was fun and I was starting to see how I could share my calendars with my wife so easily and how I could just do all this cool connected stuff that has probably been possible all along using other services but which just didn’t share the Mac karma like .Mac does and like MobileMe will.

Heck, I even got my wife to roll her eyes and that is the single biggest indicator that I am deep in Macland without a GPS.

As before with the iPhone I spent a little more time looking at what other people think about MobileMe on its own and compared to other solutions like Google’s basket of goodies and it turned out that all was not golden or delicious in the land of .Mac (soon to be MobileMe). Sure there is some cool stuff like automatically pushing updates to all my devices (at the moment I only really have one – my MacBook) but I can access IMAP mail already using Gmail. I have Google Calendar too which theoretically syncs well with my Mac using Spanning Sync (ok, the less I say about my Spanning Sync experiences the better) and Plaxo itself. You even made it possible for me to sync my Mac address book with Yahoo! and Gmail straight out of Address Book.

The fact that there are other services out there which do similar things isn’t the end of the story for me. .Mac does it all so much better and I am sure MobileMe will be even better than .Mac. What is a bit of a show-stopper is the $99 price tag for a single user (compared to that the $149 price tag for the family account isn’t too bad, but still). Granted that works out to less than $10 a month, it still costs more than I pay Plaxo for my premium subscription and what I dropped on Spanning Sync a couple months ago for this year’s subscription. I don’t know why you do this to me Uncle Steve. That is a lot of cash to spend on a service that is so similar to the free options and double the cost of a paid service that does almost the same thing. And it isn’t like the deal is that good to justify such a price. Sure 20GB is a lot of space for mail and files but I pay a lot less than $99 for a lot more storage space on Amazon’s S3 service and I get a 6GB mailbox (and counting) on Gmail. So what’s the big deal with MobileMe? The cool interface and built in connectivity with my Mac? Sure that is in your favour but the price tag just doesn’t cut the mustard or do whatever it should do to make sense to me.

Of course I could be missing something and I’ll be using the rest of my trial to figure that out. I don’t think I am missing anything though. I just think you are being a little unreasonable here.

Your loyal, yet slowly fading fan,

Paul

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