If you want clothes on the cheap, head to a town in Vietnam called Hoi An. This town has been known for cotton production for some time, and an extension of that reputation has been the building of a major clothing cottage industry. Hoi An now has more tailors than you can shake a stick at. All over the center of town, clothes shops line the streets, with cloth wares of all sorts spilling out into the sidewalks. On the streets themselves, mixed in with the heavy foot traffic, multitudinous scooters, and the occasional car, are armies of street-vendor kids mixed with the occasional, and more subtle, hawker for these clothing shops.

"Hey, where you from? America? Got American coin?"

"Hey! Want to buy this whistle?" <Kid blows on whistle with a sound that reminds one of that old Western music, though you can't remember the name of the film. Doo-de-doo-de-doooo... The only thing missing is the horn section going wanh waanh waaaaanhhhh> "How about an ancient Vietnamese coin. Very old."

"Hey, want to buy some postcards? Will you look for free, 10 postcards, one dollar!"

"Hey! What you need? What you looking for?"

"Hey! Cyclo?!? Cyclo!?! You want ride? Cheap!"

"Hey, where you from? Want to look at my clothes?"

That last one may sound naughty, but it's not. It's just someone else wanting us to go look at the clothing shop they work for. The thing is that all these tailors seem to be good, and they are all CHEAP. They can make just about anything, including copying anything from a catalog or a picture you bring, just by looking at the picture! The quality of the material is high, and the craftsmanship is certainly as good as anything I have seen in the States.

We ended up getting tailor made leather coats for US$30 (full length woman's coat), and US$25 (leather jacket), and I was able to get some awesome button-up shirts tailor made for me for US$7 each, and I even had two inch-wide ties made for US$2.50 each to appeal to my Mod side. Try finding an inch-side tie in the States that's not 25 years old.

Mind you, we didn't try to haggle, so we could have gotten these things cheaper, but what's the point? The clothes are good, and the price was great. When those two things come together the right way, who wants to haggle over a couple of dollars? Not me, and certainly not my girlfriend, at any rate.

If only Apple could be so accommodating with .Mac.

I mentioned yesterday that I thought Apple needed to offer some better options for .Mac. I know I am late to the table with this, but as I said in yesterday's column, my travel schedule and vacation to Vietnam simply didn't allow me to give this the attention it deserved, until now. Better late than never, as no one in my family has ever really said, so here goes.

Let me start off with the fact that I fully understand that Apple needs to charge for the services formerly known as iTools. Apple offered iTools originally in the hope that it would sell more Macs. Get a Mac, and get all these very cool services too. When iTools was first introduced, I personally had the feeling that there were going to be lots of other services added to iTools as time went on. Instead, Apple actually pared down its offerings. Mac.com e-mail accounts, Apple's Home Page service, and possibly eCards seemed to be what people really wanted, and I get the idea that iTools itself didn't really do what Apple had wanted it too, which was again, to help sell more Macs.

The nature of the three services mentioned above being what they are, they require servers and bandwidth. Servers aren't much of an issue for Apple, being a hardware company and all, but bandwidth costs money, and sysadmin time isn't cheap either. You can bet that iTools has been costing Apple many millions of dollars per year in development time, sysadmin time, support costs, bandwidth, and facilities. That money has to come from somewhere, and if it isn't coming from increased sales of new hardware, then it's going to have to come from me and you, iTools' users.

That brings us to the introduction of .Mac, and the death of iTools itself. Note, by the way, that moving from the iTools name to .Mac served three purposes. It helped to differentiate the free service from the subscription service, it was a mild slap in the face to Microsoft in parody of their still vaporware .Net, and perhaps more importantly, it ended any friction with Tenon, Inc. who owns the trademark for their long-established server tools, also called iTools.

The dream of most companies is to find some way of locking customers into some sort of recurring revenue deal. It's what Microsoft is trying to do with its Windows licensing, especially in the corporate world, as well as .Net, and it's something that would really help Apple's bottom line over the long haul. I am delighted that the company hasn't chosen to go Microsoft's route and make Mac OS X into a subscription service. In fact, Apple has gone the opposite route with Mac OS X Server by allowing the basic license that comes with Xserve be used for unlimited connections, something that would cost the gross national product of Peru for Windows. Charging for .Mac really makes sense from the standpoint of Apple's business model, as well as the realities of today's Internet.

So, if I am all kinds of accepting of Apple's need to charge for .Mac, where's my beef? It's with the company's implementation of its pay scheme. The first problem is the 45 days Apple gave all of us to switch, the second thing is the complete lack of any sort of e-mail only version of .Mac, and the third thing is that one gets only one e-mail address for one's US$99 per year.

In my never humble opinion, Apple should have given existing iTools account holders 6 months to keep our accounts, while offering an incentive to switch to .Mac earlier. In fact, it's not too late for the company to extend that deadline, and I call on you to ask Apple to do just that. Due to the way iTools was introduced, as a free service with an implied contract (though never stated, as has been misunderstood around the Mac Web) of it remaining free, early adopters need to be rewarded for being early adopters by being given enough time to make a leisurely transition. If not 6 months, then give us 3 months at least. It might also give Apple's competition enough time to introduce competing services for less than .Mac, but that's not our problem.

The second thing Apple needs to do is to offer a cheap e-mail only version of .Mac, for something like US$15 or US$20 per year. That's a fair price in the current market, and I'll take Apple's Webmail interface over the competition's any day. Apple could limit these accounts to either Webmail or POP access, or by limiting the amount of messages one can get, or the amount of messages one can have in one's in-box, or whatever else they needed to do to differentiate it from the full version of .Mac, but the company should offer some sort of e-mail only service. Alternately, or perhaps in addition to, Apple should offer legacy account holders the option of keeping free e-mail-only accounts for another year or two. Again, this is to reward early adopters for embracing Apple technology early. If push came to shove, the company could even combine the above ideas and offer e-mail only accounts for US$19 per year only to legacy account holders. Apple, show us that you respect our commitment to using your technology.

As I said on Monday, Apple runs the risk of telling its customers that if you invest in Apple technology today, you'll pay later. That's a message the company can't afford to deliver.

For the third complaint, and this is the most minor, Apple needs to broaden the number of e-mail names a .Mac holder can have from one to five. One e-mail account for US$99 per year is outrageous. Even Gouge Meister AOL lets account holders have seven names (it used to be five, but I am told it's been seven names for the last year or so), and the same goes for just about every other major ISP on the market. Before leaping to the company's defense by saying that Apple is charging less than ISPs for an account, remember that the ISP account comes with the IS portion of ISP, which is Internet Service. Apple isn't including access for its US$99. No, for that much money, let me have more POP accounts.

These are really minor complaints, but that makes them all that much more crucial. I am not asking for free .Mac for life, I just want the option of having an e-mail only service, and I am asking to not be penalized for having trusted Apple and embracing iTools from the beginning. It's not too much to ask, but it would make .Mac right for me. How about you?

If you feel strongly about .Mac, write Apple and tell them. They have provided a very easy to use feedback form, and have solicited feedback. As I said yesterday, Apple has shown that it listens, so let them know how you feel.

began using Apple computers in 1983 in a high school BASIC programming class. He started using Macs in 1990 when the Kinko's guy taught him how to use Aldus PageMaker, finally buying a Power Computing Power 100 in 1995. Today, Bryan is the Editor of The Mac Observer, and has contributed to the print versions of MacAddict and MacFormat (UK).

You can send your comments directly to him, or you can also post your comments below.

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