What happened to .Mac?

After all the fuss over the new Mac OS X Leopard features, the rest of today's announcements and the Apple.com site redesign, I finally noticed that .Mac has taken a bit of a back seat on the site, at least for now. Note that along the new minimal site navigation bar at the top of Apple's site, .Mac no longer enjoys its own tab. Apple has of course done some house cleaning and simplified that navigation menu, and .Mac is now a sub-section under the main Mac tab, along with Apple's other Mac hardware and software products, and is featured under the "Why You'll Love A Mac" section. The .Mac link at the very bottom of Apple's pages has been turned into a header, with the Learn More and Log In links broken out — www.mac.com still works, though, redirecting to apple.com/dotmac.

Keep in mind that the .Mac site was not merely used for product promotion: it also served as the gateway to the web-based .Mac services like Mail, Bookmarks, Address Book, etc. Of course, it could easily be argued that the web-based .Mac services took a major back seat to the applications and features Apple has built into Mac OS X, but still: what could this mean? Jobs recently admitted that .Mac wasn't achieving its full potential and that it was due for an overhaul, so it doesn't quite make sense to assume the service is in any serious trouble. The more likely assumption here is that .Mac is in fact (or at least hopefully) undergoing that overhaul Mr. J mentioned, and that it will regain some prominence at Apple's site once it returns for the next round.

When that will be, of course, is still anyone's guess. There was no real mention of .Mac during today's keynote, nor any mention of its close companion iLife, either. As usual with Apple's quiet attitude towards development, we'll have to play the waiting game to see what becomes of Apple's polarizing web service package.