A .Mac-Google Apps integration makes sense

As this year’s WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) approaches, Apple fans are furiously speculating on what kind of news will be dropped on us in San Francisco. We already know about the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard preview, and no doubt Apple CEO Steve Jobs will have something to say about the iPhone. But from what I know about the players and the IT landscape, I think Jobs has another “just one more thing” up his sleeve.

[ For the latest from the show, read Tom Yager’s Enterprise Mac blog. ]

I’ve been looking at what Apple and its partners need to do to fill gaps in their product line-up. At the moment, I think the Macintosh platform’s biggest weakness is its reliance on Microsoft Office for productivity software. Microsoft has always built solid products for Mac — but they were always just a bit behind or somehow incompatible with their Windows equivalents. Entourage does 90 percent of what Outlook does, but it lacks features right where it hurts: In enterprise settings. Word for Mac doesn’t have the same Macro or OOXML support as the PC version. PowerPoint files are still not 100 percent compatible between platforms.

Basically, Apple and its customers get the short end of the Microsoft stick.

Add to that the industry move toward Web 2.0 applications and Cloud computing — and a number of other recent shifts in the technology landscape — and you have a climate for change. I don’t think Apple wants to wait on Microsoft to delegate how its business applications will work.

In fact, I think Apple would like to move forward with a leading-edge partner like, say, Google and create business rather than follow in it.

That’s why I think Jobs will take the stage at WWDC next week and announce that Apple and Google are going to team up to bring Google Apps to .Mac customers.

Let’s connect some dots and see what picture emerges:

In a recent stockholder meeting, Jobs admitted that .Mac has hasn’t achieved its full potential but said the company is working on it.

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO and a member of the Apple Board, has said there are a lot of Apple-Google partnerships to come because both companies have “common competitors.” Hmmmm. Microsoft is a common competitor, and its bread and butter — aside from Windows — is Office. We’ve already seen a flurry of Google Applications for Macintosh, plus GMaps and Gmail on the iPhone, so why not Google Docs and Spreadsheets integrated into .Mac? Seems like a perfect fit.

Using iChat as a guide, we know that another network — AOL — allowed .Mac users to use their own xxx@mac.com address as their AOL Instant Messenger screen name. Google could do the same thing in Apps. Perhaps the whole mac.com domain would be ported to Google Apps.

Google has lots of cheap, fast space. It also has the ability and desire to search it and advertise on it (monetize it).

Gmail has won the battle against .Mac’s mail for most Macintosh users. As for calendar/IM/address book integration, disk space, and spam detection, Google wins most of the battles hands down. Google spends $5 per domain for Apps users through its Adsense subsidiary. It wants more non-paying users, and Apple would be happy to offload its .Mac users. Those users, who pay $100 a year as .Mac members, could get a premium version of Google Apps with desktop backups and larger file space as well as the benefits they currently enjoy. Apple’s focus is on hardware and software. It should — and should want to — stick with what it does best.

We know that iChat in Leopard has a special account preference for GTalk accounts. Of course, you can currently use any Jabber server in iChat — GTalk is based on Jabber — but it’s interesting that Apple has split off GTalk from the rest of the Jabber servers.

It has been 18 months, forever in software development at Apple, since the iWork app was last updated. That is lots of time for Apple to do some pretty interesting things. I would love to see Apple enter the Blog editing game, where MarsEdit, Ecto, and Journaler are sweeping up. Such a move would be a serious game changer for the fight on the Mac platform between Apple’s Pages and Microsoft’s Word. And for Google, what better way to get into blog editing than with its Writley technology?

Google needs a Keynote type of presentation tool; Apple needs a spreadsheet tool to round out their Office competition. Each has what the other needs.

Throw Sun’s OpenOffice.org into the mix. The first native Alpha release of this software came out this week. Both Apple and Google have been playing very nice with Sun lately.

iWork. The most important piece of the puzzle might just be iWork, which could be a caching front end for Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Use it when you are on an airplane, at grandma’s house with no Internet, in the subway, or wherever Internet access is spotty. Or how about this curveball: Apple could port its iWork and iLife applications to Windows?

Quicktime and iTunes already enjoy a large following in the Windows camp.

Woo them with the apps, win them over to the OS.

Oh, and one more thing. I realize we’re flopping off of the deep end here, but what if Apple were to sell a Leopard virtual machine for Windows that functions like Parallels in Coherence mode (except you’d have the Mac OS running in Windows, not the other way around)? The result: Run Leopard anywhere! You could even boot from a Google hosted OS. This need not be a full version, mind you, but a stripped down, embedded version of the Mac OS like what’s being thrown into Apple TV and the iPhone. One of the great things about virtualization is that there’s less need for drivers and such, which makes installing small Google or Apple apps on your Windows desktop easier.

Okay, that scenario could be years away, or never to be. But I think there is every chance that we’ll hear something about .Mac integration with Google Apps next week. It makes sense for all parties and would finally give Microsoft a run for its money. Plus, there’s that old saying: the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

Seth Weintraub is a global IT management consultant specializing in the technology needs of creative organizations, including The Paris Times, Omnicom and WPP Group. He has set up and managed cross-platform networks on four continents and is an expert in Active Directory/Open Directory PC and Macintosh integration.