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It's one of the crueler ironies in the ruthless world of high tech: You can rise to the top quickly, but few manage to stay there for long. Take Apple Computer. Back in the mid-90s, it should have been the company to introduce the Internet to the computing masses, not upstart Netscape. After all, Apple pioneered the software technology that lets you mix text, video, and sound. Such multimedia effects are driving the appeal of the Net. But Apple, which lost its way five years ago, didn't exploit its early advantage.
Today, Apple is hustling to regain its rightful place in cyberspace. Its biggest initiative: retooling its Web site as a portal. There's nothing novel about creating a portal, per se, but Apple has spun this conventional step into something new and different.
Unlike portal sites such as CNET, you won't find reams of digital text on Apple.com. What you'll find instead is the most diverse roster of free services under any one portal roof. You can set up an e-mail account, publish a Web page, send greeting cards, control Internet access for your kids, and store files. Sure, most of the big portals offer at least some of these services. But all of them as one package? Forget about it.
MAC-CENTRIC.
What you won't find at Apple.com is advertising. That's right. The only promotions on this portal are for Apple itself. It's not that the company doesn't want to profit from the Net. Its methods are just more subtle. You see, Mac users love the Internet. According to Apple's market research, more than 93% of all iMac owners Web surf. Apple hopes to keep these users loyal by serving up a Mac-centric package of free Internet services.
As usual, Apple has worked hard at making its new Net services easy to use. You'll find them all under one tab, called iTools, at the top of the homepage. The one thing you need is Apple's latest operating system, OS 9. Apple's iTools service won't work with any earlier versions of the Mac OS.
For me, the most interesting iTool is something called iDisk, which provides 20 megabytes of storage on an Apple server. You can keep family photos, home movies, your home finances, or that 1,000-page novel you've been slaving over for years.
A FEW GRIPES.
Why bother storing files on an Apple server? Here are two reasons you might consider it: as a backup of last resort if anything should happen to your Mac and as a place you could log on to and work from anywhere with Internet access. What makes iDisk really cool is that it works just like any disk represented as an icon on your Mac screen. Click on the icon for the iDisk service, and an image of a disk appears on the desktop. Save or update files by simply dragging them onto the iDisk icon. The icon vanishes when you log off iTools. Pretty cool.
A word about security. Apple assures that what you save on iDisk will remain private and protected. Still not comfortable? Then you can encrypt files with OS 9. Encrypting is easy. Select the document and choose encrypt from the File menu.
Yes, iDisk still is a work in progress, and it has its shortcomings. Apple will kick you off iDisk if its icon sits idle on your desktop for more than 15 minutes. And you can't customize iDisk the way you would a regular disk, organizing and naming your own system of folders.
My biggest gripe is that iDisk and the other iTools work only with OS 9. That means millions of Mac users can't try Apple's new Net services unless they buy OS 9, which retails for about $100. I hope squeezing an extra $100 out of Apple aficionados isn't the reason Apple has excluded owners with older operating systems. If it is, it's pretty short-sighted. Why not let every Mac owner try iTools? Surely that would help greatly to revive Apple's reputation as an Internet player.
Haddad, an Apple Computer buff, is Atlanta-based correspondent for Business Week. If you're an Apple buff, too, follow his weekly column, only on BW Online EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
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