Does Apple really understand the web?

I am not certain that Apple really understands the web. Let me follow that quickly with the thought that I might not understand it either.

Certainly if I considered the .Mac experience to be the best measure of Apple's web understanding, I would have to give Apple a failing grade.  There is no way around it, .Mac is not worth what many of us pay for it.

The NY Times has an article about Apple and Microsoft looking to keep their relevance in a web based world.  Over a year ago I wrote the post, "How much longer will operating systems really matter, even to Apple?."

Google has done some aggressive acquisitions since I wrote that article.  I regularly use Google apps and really like having free storage for my documents.

There are also new web oriented products out there like Backpack.  Then there are products like Mapwing which started out as a Mac application which was dropped after the developers figured out that what people really wanted was a web-based tool.

Blogging services such as Typepad and Blogger continue to grow in what you can do with them and in the ways that you can promote what you do.

Microsoft and Google will even host your websites for free as my  White Oak River site and my Ocracoke Waves placeholder sites demonstrate.  Both also have ways to promote your sites, and I even make a little money from people who click on ads that I have in my Ocracoke Waves blog, my Digital Camera for Real Estate post, Email Services for Small Businesses article and in my Beaufort, NC Travel Guide.

Google in effect helps me make some money with my computer.

This morning I also read in the NY Times Technology service about individuals' digital photos on the web being sold for micro amounts. I have long ago quit adding new photos to my .Mac site.  It is much each to add the photos to my Flickr site or my Picasa Web Albums site.  I wonder how long it will take Flickr or Picasa to jump on the micro-payments band wagon?

It dawned on me that Apple has done an exceptional job of using the web to build a business for Apple.  While .Mac was an early leader in making it easier to put photos on the web, Apple has fallen behind as the web has become a tool for individuals to use to promote their own business interests.

Apple efforts on the web have been focused on Apple and people who might not use the web without Apple's help. Those of us who want more control on our websites, great flexibility, and help making money from our efforts are certainly better off with other products than .Mac.

Even Apple's basic web tool, iWeb, really doesn't stand up very well.  While I don't pretend to be an iWeb expert, and I suspect I don't even have the latest version, it is a very frustrating program in that Apple continues to try to exercise lots of creative control over what has become very personalized web world.

I am trying to test iWeb against Shutterbug, Rapidweaver, Freeway Pro, and Dreamweaver. My efforts are going to take a while longer.  My guess is that I have not used iWeb enough to know its tricks or give it a fair test.

Yet I started using Freeway Pro again the other day after not using the product for over three years.  It only took me a little while to get going, and I was able to crank out a test site for replacing my site sobotta.org site which I built on a Dreamweaver template.

While Freeway Pro is a little quirky on some things, it is a pretty good product for drag-and-drop-placement and web creation.  If it had some good templates like Dreamweaver, it could be a very nice product.

Still if you look at Google's web efforts and Microsoft's Office Live, they are both focused on small businesses or people who want to use their websites for business.  Google and Microsoft are focused on helping them do that and making money while they do it.

I think Apple is missing an opportunity, the amount of web traffic I get for small businesses that I mention in my blogs is pretty astounding.  Many of them don't have a website because they find it too hard to do, and even if they have one they have a hard time driving traffic to it.

I would like to see Apple make the consumer version of .Mac free once again and have an upgraded for fee version for small businesses.  The expertise that Apple has applied to making its own business successful on the web could make a huge difference for small businesses. I wonder whatever happened to the dream behind WebObjects?

In fact I have been thinking that I should create a Mac Realtor® workstation.  There are not products on the Windows side nearly as good as Shutterbug, Rapidweaver, and OmniGraffle.  I continue to watch Realtors® struggle with things that just work on a Mac, and few will ever consider a Mac because they are afraid of change.

Apple has all the pieces with Quicktime movies to do some really neat things like I did with this lake view listing up the street from my home on the North Carolina Coast.  They could easily differentiate themselves from the Google and Microsoft offerings.

In the meantime, I continue to be pleased with the quality of the sites that I can generate using Mac based tools.  Using just iPhoto and Shutterbug, in minutes I can easily add fresh content to my sites like this photo slide show from last night's walk on the beach.  Creating a folder on my website and uploading with Fetch is a piece of cake.

With Photoshop, even the ancient version I have, preparing an individual photo for the web is pretty simple.  It all just works together really well on a Mac.

The challenge is that unless you have learned how to it with a Mac yourself, you are more likely to take advantage of web tools that Google and Microsoft offer even if the results aren't as good.  No one is out there really screaming about the great tools that are on the Mac. And Microsoft and Google seem to have the idea that helping you do well on the web is important.

I would like to see Apple create a quality revolution on the web similar to what they did in print.

There is no doubt that the potential is there, I can see a little of what could be even in my experiments last year with iWeb.  I am about to try podcasting and Apple should be the leader there.

Of course creating a great suite of web tools is not nearly as cool as the iPhone, but it would fuel a long term boom in Mac computer sales among small business that want to get serious about the web and aren't willing to settle for anything less than the best website around.

I'm sure I'll get the inevitable Apple is skipping the paradigm of the desktop computer, and going to use the iPhone to take over the web, somehow I don't think the iPhone is product for what I am suggesting.

However, a nice big screen iMac would do fine, or even better an inexpensive new tower with a fantastic flat panel.

Comments

[Michael Berman]

Good observations. I have tried several times to have a dialog with Apple about .mac and the web and have had little traction. I know that there is work going on with .mac and I think there's at least a chance that we'll see something next week with a new level of .mac/leopard integration.

If you think about it, the web is absolutely contradictory to the Apple strategy of end-to-end control. Ironically, Apple, which positioned itself as the anti-IBM finds itself embedded in a legacy philosophy.

Another irony is that the Mac is the preferred development platform for so much of Web 2.0, but you sure don't need a Mac to use it.

[Matthew Parcher]

If you look at the coverage of last week's "All Things Digital Conference", you'll see that when asked about Apple's failure to exploit .Mac, Steve (Jobs) seemed to agree and even implied that Apple was working on something to be shown soon.

[alex Patsay]

"It is much each to add the photos to my Flickr site or my Picasa Web Albums site. "

much _easier_? Or is it just me?

[alex Patsay]

and now on a subject. Recently I was starting my full blog (yeah, took me a while), and I went trough iWeb/RapidWeaver/Sandvox/Freeway Pro and some other tools, but none of them offered a set of tools that would let me do that easy and simple. Every program had its own tricks - it was either hard to add comments, or ads, or statistics, or problems with non-English languages, etc. I ended up using WordPress+Ecto, which is nicely integrated and easy to use solution, but not flexible enough if you want to customize the design and do that with mouse and drag-and-drop. I'd prefer to have something like iWeb for design and WordPress for publishing.