Apple and Google - Partnership Next Week?

With Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC) on schedule for next week, this is the time for rumors to come flying. The latest one and highly-probable one: Apple and Google partnering up on updating Apple’s .Mac service.

Apple’s .Mac service provides consumers with one gigabyte of shared email/web storage that users can back their own documents up to and also host websites on. They also provide online calendar, synchronizing of bookmarks to multiple computers, and more, for $99/year. While this is all put on by Apple and seems like a good round-up features, Google, the search-engine giant, has most, if not all of these features for free and are in some cases better than what Apple currently provides. Google’s GMail service provides users with a continuously growing amount of storage space for their email, as well as Google PageBuilder to create your own site on, Google Calendar, and many other features that Apple provides.

Apple has been bashed for not updating these features to catch up with competitors, but that may change. Wired is reporting that Apple and Google may partner up with each other to update the .Mac service to make it more comparable to other solutions. In an interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and also an Apple board member, he believed that this was bound to happen. “We’re a perfect back end to the problems that they’re trying to solve. They have very good judgment on user interface and people. But they don’t have this supercomputer (that Google has), which is the data centers. What they have is a manufacturing business that’s doing quite well.”

This could be a hint to an upcoming re-release of the .Mac service. Also, when Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, was asked at the D Conference last week, he said that they “will make up for lost time in the very near future” for their putting off .Mac upgrade. We will see how this all folds out on Monday, June 11 at the WWDC keynote speech.