Apple's new .mac strategy is great, but why would I want to switch all my Windows gear over for it? Especially for the honor of paying an extra $100 a year for the services, in addition to having slower hardware.

Thought: Market the services for free to Mac users, but offer the apps for Windows machines for the aforementioned fee. A couple of corporate adoptions (at a reduced rate, of course) could fund the cost of the program for all Mac users.

AND/OR

Offer the .mac services as a part of the new rackmount servers, so that people can host their own .mac solution either in their homes or offices. Include this as apart of the suite of tools that the server arrives with, all the documentation on .pdf preloaded, and you'll have everything you'll need to get the admins rolling. This provides a back door entry into the market by letting the server admins play with the software and see if it's any good before it gets rolled out throughout a corporation. The last three companies that I worked at could would have benefited massively from this tech, as they all had people that would work from home during the week, and in the case of some, put in crazy hours from home as well. For those users, being able to synch up everything would have been a massive boon.

Either way would allow for greater market penetration by co-opting the existing Windows users without compromising the hardware control that Apple seems to need to have so very badly.

9:43:07 AM