In October of 2007 I’ll have had a .Mac membership account for 5 years. I even signed up when it was only availible in the US claiming a $50 rebate and getting my first year for $49.95. During that time I’ve seen iSync become more prevalent, .Mac Groups materialise and an ever growing integration with the iLife suite. The size of my Mailbox has grown (albeit only to 512MB). iDisk storage grew to 1GB. .Mac Webmail was given a new sexy interface (although spam filtering is still done by Mail.app and not at the server side). What this amounts to will be 5 years worth ‘it just works’ stuff but not very much of it.
I also use Windows Live Mail, have several Google accounts and use Amazon’s S3 through S3 Browser for Mac OSX. A combination of thse services would get me more than I have in a .Mac subscription for a fraction of the price.
Alan Graham of ZDNet has given his view on these matters:
Apple’s New Web 2.0 Service for 2007 by ZDNet’s Alan Graham — Well, dear readers, we’ve seen another Steve Jobs Keynote come and go, and while I was excited about the iPhone announcement, I still felt a little disappointment that we heard nothing about the stagnate red-headed stepchild of Apple…dot Mac. Sure, it isn’t as sexy as an iPod Phone…but it certainly is the hub of a [...]
I tend to agree. The iPhone is something that I would expect to utilise .Mac a lot. And I don’t want to have to sign up to Yahoo! Mail (something I dropped using about 3 years ago) just for push email. But in order for this to become reality the .Mac service needs to be refreshed.
My suggestion would be: .Mac mail upgraded to 2GB storage with spam filtering on the server end of things (does the iPhone have the spam filtering capabilities of Mac OSX Mail.app? doubt it); SMS Text messaging inbox integrated into Mail.app; iDisk storage at 4GB with an option to pay more per gigabyte as per Amason S3 (maybe even using S3!); iSync would work over EDGE / WiFi / Bluetooth with the iPhone sync’ing to both PC, Mac and .Mac. I’m implying that Apple would have to release the iLife suite, Mail.app etc. for Windows. This is probably a bit far fetched but would open up the .Mac service posiibilities to many more people. Alternatively Apple could just release OSX.5 for PC’s. 
Either way the .Mac service is in need of some love. Or have Apple decided it’s not worth the investment and will hand over (perhaps in the first instance through integration) with either Yahoo! or Google accounts? Mr. Schmidt on the Board at Apple? Can only be a good thing surely.