Apple vs Google: World War 3.0?

For the past couple of years, Apple has been pushing for sales of its .Mac service, which is soon becoming MobileMe, an online service that integrates with Apple's desktop software, keeping everything up-to-date.  Mac users are able to easily publish the websites they created in iWeb, share the photos they organize with iPhoto, and synchronize the contacts and emails that they store in Apple's Address Book and Mail.  This seems like a valuable service to be paired with the iLife suite, and not necessarily a bad deal at $99 per year.  But even for Steve Jobs, it's hard to compete with free.

And that's just what Google has been offering: the ability to easily publish a personal websites, share photos managed by a desktop application, and store contacts from multiple sources in a single repository...all for five cents less than a nickel.  Even though I'm sitting on my couch typing on my Mac, you might be able to tell by my website where my online loyalty lies.

I use Gmail because it has a terrific interface, some bonus features that I like, and is free.  I use Blogger because it's highly visible, easy to publish to, and allows me to maintain a professional-looking site without spending much time designing style.  Oh, I almost forgot: it's free.

I use Apple's computers because of their simple design, their lack of major technical issues, and their comfortable OS.  For those reasons and many others, I expect to be a supporter of Apple's products for a while.  But as Google improves its product suite and offers more integration with Mac applications (you can already upload to Google's Picasa from iPhoto), I see Apple's hundred-dollar-a-year software becoming obsolete in a hurry.  After all, why pay $99/a year for something if a perfectly comparable substitute is available for free?