Lots of people are giving up on .Mac, not just fcodc from Mac Recon, and for the same list of reasons. Why pay the subscription fee when you can get equivalent or better services from Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, and other third-party providers for much less or even free? One quick browse through the Digg archives on anything .Mac related and you're greeted with an avalanche of customer complaints and shattered confidence. It's as though the apples of Apple's eye are its iPod and CPU businesses, and .Mac's the neglected child.

Well, one guy over at the unofficial apple weblog (TUAW) isn't about to give up on .Mac, no matter how disappointed he is. Not yet anyway. He aims to convince his readers to assert their rights as customers and flood Apple with a petition to improve .Mac's services and make it worth the fees that they pay for its use. He had posted a template for a viral petition that he asks dissatisfied .Mac users to copy and paste onto the .Mac feedback form at the Apple website.

He does have his skeptics. One comment noted a lack of confidence in online petitions themselves, saying that, in this case, a viral petition would feel more like a negative publicity campaign for .Mac, and Apple would simply dismiss it as customer whining. Another noted that the only way to grab the company's attention is to hit it where it hurts: the revenue from .Mac, because Apple will only start paying attention if a majority of its subscribers would suddenly pull out (or so the comment implied).

On the other hand, given all the news regarding Apple customer support and feedback lately, neglecting .Mac until it's too late may be par for the course with the company. It did take Cupertino quite some time to officially acknowledge a number of defects and issues with the MacBook and MacBook Pro as either factory defects or something covered by AppleCare, such as the MacStains, the whining keyboard, batteries, and sudden shutdowns. If a snowball of petitions doesn't get their attention, who knows what will?