Apple doesn’t say thank you. Apple is not in the business for rewarding me for spending nearly $40,000 over the last 6 years on their products (true statement). I haven’t received a thank you note in the mail or any sort of recognition for blogging about their products or selling their products to friends and family or working at one of their retail stores or attending Macworld or WWDC. My being first in line for the iPhone 3GS in SF or original iPhone in Florida didn’t yield some email from Steve Jobs saying, “thanks for the support.”
Nah. Apple doesn’t give a shit. Sure, they give some shit but not enough to have some rewards program like Marlboro points for every pack of cigarettes you buy. That’s not Apple and I’m okay with that.
However, those of us who paid $99 a year from 2002 to 2011 for .Mac / MobileMe should receive some sort of compensation in the form of a thank you or added feature or discount. I shouldn’t have to re-up with Apple after 9 years of paying for a service hoping that it would become something amazing and continually being let down every year. I’ve given Apple $800 for a cloud service over the years. That money went to building Apple’s data center, improving their products, launching things like iWork Online Beta (that never became a full fledged product) and for improving their service overall. In actuality, Apple has done very little to compete with others in this space. I don’t keep Me.com open 24/7 on my browser like I do Google Apps, Reader, Facebook and Twitter. Google owns my browser tabs. Apple’s sync service is nice sometimes and I use it often enough that I don’t feel bad paying for it but, $800 is not a price I feel comfortable with for a service that only marginally made my life better.
I expect Apple to reward existing MobileMe users next week when iCloud is announced but I doubt it. I should never expect Apple to be thankful, grateful or supportive of the users who dealt with 8 years of beta testing.
Also..iCloud will probably suck. Apple’s track record is against it here.