We have lost the middle ground. In this changing world of web services the middle ground has been lost. I’m speaking of the loss of iWeb hosting with the conversion of MobileMe to iCloud. Apple set out to make a suite of software products that would provide users with tools powerful enough and affordable to meet their needs. The had similar interfaces and talked with each other nicely. iWeb is a fairly easy to use offline website builder. But it suffered from poor planning, lack of time and money on upgrades and a changing market.
I started doing websites in the early 90’s typing code in a text editor. Then Microsoft FrontPage came along and gave me powerful tools and easier design, but it had its issues. After I switched to Mac, I had nothing until iWeb came along. I enjoy it due to its’ ease of use and integration with iPhoto. However it has drawbacks. 1. The software designers gave it features that could only be used when hosted by .mac/MobileMe (which is part of the reason I got the service). The issue is it was not open standards and it seems Apple could not keep a clear line of thought on their web services. 2. iWeb saves to one file on the hard drive and you better back up multiple places off of your local drive because if you don’t you are out of luck. iWeb publishes to multiple files on the web and you CANNOT import a published site back into iWeb. That is just poor design! 3. Poor blogging design. I use the blog feature to capture photos and text for each day of the mission trips I go on. But several times iWeb has just totally deleted them with no trace (even using a Time Machine back up). Since I cannot restore them from the web I’ve had to have a browser open and iWeb open and rebuild them from scratch.
Then you have the changing market. It has now become a somewhat polarized market. You have people who use tumblr to post things that can say around for a little while. You have basic blogs to share info. You then have people who want more and make a blog a website with WordPress. Then you have the pros who learn the “full featured” editors and make a living by designing for others. Who suffers? People like me who want more than a blog, less than learning pro software, and like to design offline and don’t want to learn WordPress.
You see this is an area where Apple has conceded to the changing market rather than innovating and leading the way. Apple is giving email free to users, syncing content (calendars, contacts, photos, and music), and innovating in great ways. But they could do more. They could invest the time to rebuild iWeb for the new age and have it link to other iCloud services. Prove free hosting up to a certain size limit and then charge reasonable fees for more. They could make an iPad version of iWeb. But I fear that Apple does not want to innovate here. They will just let iWeb fall by the wayside. Then we who are middle ground users will give up and go the easy route of a blog or be forced to spend time and money we don’t have to move to the big leagues. Sad but true.
Steve and Apple, I’m calling you out! Quit conseding ground and start inovating. Let people see they can do more than just blog or just share photos. Help them have a digital presence and not have to have a computer science degree to do it. While your at let it integrate with iCloud, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. THINK DIFFERENT APPLE!
