The press on Apple’s Dot Mac service has been mediocre at a best lately, and one doesn’t have to look very far to find commentary berating it for any number of reasons such as the price tag, the lack of features compared to many of the other offerings out there, or just the performance of it in general.

Even the recent improvements to the webmail and address book interface were met with mixed reviews, with the general feeling being that it was about time Apple caught up with the other technology out there.

However, I think that many people are really missing the point of what .Mac is and what it’s intended to be. Each of the .Mac services, taken separately, don’t necessarily have much to recommend them; there are certainly better e-mail services out there, better online storage services, better web hosting services, and so forth. However, few of these “solutions” integrate all of those services together in the way that .Mac does.

More to the point, few of these other solutions can offer such an insanely easy turnkey solution for the average Mac user. For one relatively low annual fee, one gets all of the possible online services that the average user would need, rolled up into one nice neat package that “just works” for the most part with the technology that is already built in to Mac OS X.

.Mac’s detractors often quote how much more cheaply they can get e-mail services or web hosting from other providers. GMail seems to be a favourite point for these folks to quote how there is a wonderful free solution out there for both e-mail and file storage, and there’s therefore no reason anybody should ever pay for e-mail.

Now, I for one firmly believe in paying for any service that I would rely on, and for me, e-mail is absolutely mission critical, period. I do not believe that Google is as altruistic an organization as many would want to believe, and therefore have no desire to stake my e-mail on a “free” service. Certainly, Apple’s not necessarily any better, but at least I know what they’re getting out of providing me with e-mail service: $99/year. Apple’s motives are clear, as is the likelihood that they will continue providing this service as long as enough people are paying for it.

Certainly, there are other good inexpensive commercial solutions for e-mail, web hosting, and online storage, but these ultimately end up being standalone services, and one has to shop around a bit to find out what is going to work best, and play the game of trying to integrate these services both into the Mac OS experience, and with each other.

It’s not that these aren’t good services — they are, but to compare them to what .Mac offers is actually somewhat unfair. .Mac is really not trying to be all things to all people, but is rather a basic solution for the average Mac user who wants one-stop shopping for a place to get e-mail and build a few snazzy web pages to share a few pictures of the kids.

It’s an unfair comparison to price out individual services and then try to suggest that you can get the same functionality as .Mac for less money, because you’re still missing a lot of the integration by doing so, both between the services themselves, but more importantly between OS X and the online world.

As I said in a previous post, I switched to a Mac to simplify my life. I never even really thought about building web pages until iWeb, as the idea generally seemed to be not worth the time and trouble. Today, however, the tools I use all have a “Publish to .Mac” button or menu option tucked conveniently within. Build a web page, push a button, walk away. This is how technology is supposed to work — quietly, in the background, and with a minimum of fuss in order to achieve a desired result.

These same applications will export web pages to a directory structure, of course, but without .Mac one would still need to get those up onto a server somehow. Granted it’s a trivial experience for somebody with a bit of technical knowledge, but it still takes more time and fussing around to do, and even designing an automator workflow to do it is still an extra step that one shouldn’t need to bother taking when a solution is there that already does the job.

Again, however, this is me speaking as a technology person, who would know how to do this. In my case, it’s mostly about efficiency of time, and not really wanting to be bothered complicating my world when I can just get one-button publishing instead. However, looking at the other person I live with, who is not technology-savvy, this would be a much more cumbersome experience. After all, what is simpler? Pressing a button and getting a web page? Or exporting to a file system, finding those files, and then figuring out how to upload them somewhere else.

Another example of how .Mac “just works” away quietly in the background was encountered when I lost my Powerbook hard drive last summer…. I was away on a project in Halifax for a couple of weeks, and my drive simply stopped spinning one morning. While I had a full backup at home (courtesy of SuperDuper), that was back in Toronto, so did me little good on the project I was on. With an external hard drive and my OS X install CDs, I had my Powerbook back up and running in under an hour, but of course that was just a clean install. This was where the .Mac sync services and iDisk backups came to my rescue: I fired up the System Preferences, entered my .Mac credentials, and then just watched as it basically downloaded all of my mission-critical data — mail preferences, e-mail messages, address book, calendar, documents in progress, and even my Safari bookmarks and keychain. Within two hours I was up and running with everything I needed, and was able to continue working as if nothing had happened.

Now, I certainly could have done this with a myriad of other online services, but the point was that I didn’t need to. Further, the configuration of this took a trivial amount of time, both originally and even later to restore my data. Once it had been configured (months before this happened), it just worked away quietly in the background, and I simply didn’t have to worry about it.

I think many of the people who demand more from .Mac don’t fully appreciate the elegance of it’s simplicity, much like any other Apple product. For instance, those who would suggest that the web hosting needs PHP and MySQL support are the same folks who would demand that the iPod add an FM radio, a voice recorder, and a web browser. None of these extra “features” are required to deliver the basic functionality of the product, which does a very good job of delivering those features that it does have.

Now, that having been said, I don’t think for a moment that there isn’t much room for improvement in the .Mac service offering, but that improvement doesn’t need to be in the area of turning it into a full-fledged web hosting service, or adding needless complexity to the other areas of the service. Rather, a few minor modifications to improve the user experience, and allow people to use the service more transparently are what is in order.

The new WebMail and Address Book interface were huge steps in the right direction, IMHO, but some basic server-side rules and spam filtering now need to be added to the mixture to provide a more “complete” web-based solution. These are things that improve the user experience and in fact reduce the complexity (by ensuring that the webmail experience more closely mirrors the Mail.app experience).

Further, the ability to allow for alternative “FROM” addresses to be used on the .Mac e-mail would be desirable. Obviously, the problems with mail forwarding in and of itself are a difficult issue, and perhaps this is why Apple doesn’t want to go there (the average user is not going to be dealing with forwarding their other mail to .Mac in most cases), but it would be a large boon to those people who want to switch to using .Mac to store their e-mail without having to switch to using a mac.com address. The same could be said for web page hosting, although this is obviously less of an issue, since redirection services exist for those who know how to use them (and those who don’t aren’t likely to care).

Another HUGE issue from a user experience point of view is the access requirements for .Mac groups. The groups are a wonderful but very under-utilized feature, since if you want to invite people who aren’t already .Mac users, they have to go through signing up for a trial account. The result has been that those who don’t have a bunch of friends already on .Mac don’t really get much traction on the .Mac groups. There needs to be a way to sign up for .Mac groups without going through the trial account registration (which will also scare most Windows users away in principle alone). Even a simpler sign-up page that just provides a basic Mac.com userid and password without requesting so much additional information would probably go a great distance in simplifying this experience. This is one area in which .Mac most definitely does NOT “just work.”

The bottom line, however, is that while .Mac needs to grow and expand somewhat to improve the user experience, the service itself does a very good job of providing what it’s designed to — a simple one-stop-shop for all the basic online services that the average Mac user is likely to need, wrapped up into a simple package that is tightly integrated with the Mac OS.