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Believing the hype on .Mac-Google

Forget about not paying attention to other people; sometimes I don't even pay attention to myself. Just four days ago, I went on record in the TUAW predictions post for WWDC with "the .Mac offering becomes an Apple-branded version of Google Apps Premier." Mayhap I should drink my own Kool-Aid, if I'm going to go to the trouble of mixing up a pitcherful.

I'm not that far out on the edge with this prediction, as there have been plenty of hints; Wired's Fred Vogelstein quoted Apple board member & Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the strengths of the companies in collaboration, the D blog picked that up and ran with it based on El Steve's comments about .Mac's decrepitude, and ComputerWorld pushed the meme out to far left field by raising the possibility of integrating iWork with Google Documents and Spreadsheets for blogging (not unlike the existing gApps and Zoho plugins for Office on the Windows side) or virtualizing Leopard-Lite into the browser. Something, as they say in the coffee business, is brewing.

Yet I found myself today -- today, Sunday, T-16 hours and counting from the Stevenote -- setting up SpanningSync for my mother's iCal/gCal integration and getting ready to whip out the credit card for a $25 one-year subscription . McFly, hello, anybody in there? For crying out loud, everybody including me and my kid sister thinks there's going to be some sort of Google integration with Mac OS X/.Mac announced tomorrow, so I smacked myself soundly in the forehead, put my wallet away, and left Mom with the 15-day demo until everything's sorted out. It's like the rule that you don't buy yourself anything right before birthdays or holidays... you just have to pay attention to what's going on around you. Or, failing that, the things you actually say.