I have had a Mac.com email address ever since I had a Mac that could send email. iTools, the predecessor of .Mac and MobileMe, has been part of my online identity since the summer of 2001. I remember when the only way to access my iTools’ IMAP email was through Outlook Express. When sending files to iDisk’s 5MBs of storage required AppleShare. When one of the perks of owning a Mac was the ability to send tasteful electronic greeting cards with Apple’s branding all over them. Before 2002 Apple’s online offerings were less about features and more about exclusivity. iTools was free, but only for Mac users.

iTools was replaced with .Mac in the summer of 2002. Suddenly my mac.com email address cost something, my online storage size got a little larger, and my iCard electronic greeting cards? Well they stayed the same. I started paying for .Mac because I saw the value in developing the online identity I started under iTools. Additional services like Apple’s miserable Backup application, and McAfee’s unwarranted virus protection never enticed me. .Mac’s early appeal was always its email address, and how it set me apart from the subscribers of Hotmail, Yahoo!, Comcast, and Earthlink. On the internet your email address is your identity. It is the one account that connects you with all of the services the web has to offer. You can’t experience most of the web’s opportunities unless you have an email address. By purchasing my .Mac email address I felt like I was securing my online presence in a way only a professional, reliable, purchased email address could.

Over the next few years .Mac’s value would grow to include services like webmail, dynamic DNS. and the ability to sync data between Apple’s computers. In 2008 .Mac was replaced with MobileMe and iCards were a thing of the past. In their place were online galleries, 20GBs of storage, and the ability to sync email, contacts, calendars to an iPhone without an Exchange server. I continued to pay for Apple’s online service for the freedom it provided. Instead of being tied to a corporate account, or a internet service provider’s email address I could take my MobileMe email, syncing, and storage with me to any job, or any part of the world.

Apple’s online services have always faced more affordable competition. From Microsoft’s free Hotmail to Google’s powerful web applications, MobileMe has never been considered inexpensive, or feature-rich. But for all you get with MobileMe the $69 discounted annual fee was not unreasonable if you lived inside Apple’s ecosystem and used all of the services MobileMe provided. The big difference between MobileMe and the free competition is the respect a paying customer is provided.

Google recently lost one of its best customers for undisclosed reasons. They canceled his account without telling him why. Google took 7 years of correspondence, over 4,800 photographs and videos, his Google Voice phone number and voicemail, all of his saved reading lists, bookmarks, contacts calendars, and more. He lost his online identity. He lost his blog. He lost his ability to be contacted by the outside world during a time that he needed his established methods of communication most. For some of the services he lost he was a paying customer, but Google’s users are never their customers. Google’s customers are advertisers. When you trust your online identity to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! you are trusting their customers, the advertisers, stay interested in you. I would rather pay for trust, then base my online identity on the profitability of click-through ads.

MobileMe is becoming a free service once again, but Apple customer’s will continue to be its users. iCloud the replacement for MobileMe is going to remain exclusive to users of Apple’s products. Apple is positioning iCloud as a feature that comes with its hardware, the price of which secures iCloud’s revenue model, and its immediate future. Nothing is certain in web services, but at least with iCloud’s model of syncing you control the data locally on your own machine at all times. If there is a lesson in why I pay for MobileMe it is to purchase what you feel is valuable but control what you value most. I hope Apple continues to offer online services that allow me to do just that.