September 10, 2006

Viral .Mac feedback

Our church is deciding on switching to an open source CMS (content management system) for hosting it's web site. I'm curious what other church's are doing for their solutions (not for blogs, but for web pages). Our current $35.00 monthly contract gives us (get this):

  1. 10 mailbox names
  2. No workable forums applications
  3. Inferior templates
  4. 50 megabytes of space on the server
This is a web management contract from the dark ages. Did you seee that server space? Fifty megs!!! This is forcing us to go with a do-it-yourself setup.

It makes me sad that Apple's .mac offering is about this poor of a service as well. I repeat here an open and repeated letter to Apple regarding their .mac service:

With competing all-in-one services taking on .Mac, and plenty of individual services offering far superior performance in contrast to their .Mac equivalents (often for free), you are quickly losing any appeal or value. Your fall from the throne isn't merely a result of your apparent disinterest in pushing the boundaries of web services, for it is also caused by your blatant and persistent lack of the basic fundamentals in much of what you offer. Easily dwarfed storage space, an insulting lack of server-side spam filtering, and competing syncing services that outpace yours in terms of both platform compatibility and innovative features - all top an extensive list of snowballing frustration and complaints from a decreasing community of .Mac users big and small. We encourage you to seek out the mounting and disenchanting feedback across the internet from your users, only because it seems that you have recently forgotten this crucial practice. Please, if you insist on charging for these aging services, start placing a refreshed effort into them so users have something to show for paying your chart-topping yearly fee. Apple is a company known for thinking different and innovating - it's time .Mac begins living up to that ideal again.

2 comments:

Danny Zacharias said...

Hi Joe. My church uses Trinity Web Hosting, which uses Joomla as the content manager. We are quite happy with it, even if it is a little pricy. They do all of the technical work, and create your template and header for you. The church secretary and my senior pastor are not tech-savvy, and they can handle Joomla's back-end just fine.

Danny

Danny Zacharias said...

p.s.

What would you like to see .mac do? Also, you said there are competing syncing services that are better, what are there names? I'm interested in possibly getting a .mac account, but I trust your judgment and would look at others if they offer ease of use.

Danny