Yesterday, I wrote a quick piece entitled .Mac glitches and futures where I pointed out a few key things about Apple's .Mac service:

1. Very little PR/Marketing
2. Great margins (esp compared to the rest of Apple's business)
3. Far behind competitive offerings in terms of storage
4. Far ahead of competitive offerings in terms of integration with media management and production tools

Today, #3 changed in an important way. Instead of your $99/yr buying you a host of nicely integrated services and 115MB of storage, it now buys you those same great services and 250MB. Still not the 1GB you get for free with Gmail, but a step in the right direction.

But speaking of Gmail... let's not forget that Google recently bought Picassa, giving Google the equivalent of iPhoto. There are plenty of rumors about Google building a browser, but as I pointed out, I believe their ambition lies closer to an information mgmt & communication "works" program... which could be (when fully realized) Apple's iLife suite crossed w/ browser/email/rss reader.