I've been wrestling with a moral dilemma for the last several days, tying me up in little knots, getting to the core of who I am both personally and professionally.

At last week's Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announce the .mac ('dot-mac') initiative, essentially taking the functionality of iTools, adding a few other features, and packaging it as a $100/yr subscription package.

There's some nice functionality in it, but at the same time they're also discontinuing iTools itself. Hundreds of thousands of Apple users who have been using the service, and using their mac.com email addresses will now lose those addresses unless they agree to pay $100 a year. There is no free version, and there is no announced forwarding policy.

As a user experience designer, this irritates me to no end. An Apple executive has been quoted in a News.com article as saying they anticipate that only 10% of the users will actually migrate to the paid service, meaning that 90% will lose their email addresses. Permanently.

Having worked at Yahoo for the last year, I'm no stranger to the push for subscription-based premium services, but Yahoo and most companies that are still in business have done it right: Charge for enhanced services and new services. when you can't do that, charge for those services which were free but are still ancillary, like POP mail access, but don't take a free service and tell your users 'tough. Fish or cut bait.'

So what did I do? I made a commercial. In the 'switch' style, but using no Apple logos or implied consent, I voiced my own opinion on Apple's new policy, and frankly I'm pretty proud of the result.

And herein lies the problem: Once I finish my HCI masters at Carnegie Mellon next year, Apple is very high on the list of companies where I would like to work. Knowing that a video/protest like this could come back to haunt me, I decided to make a pixelated version, hoping to obscure my identity. Still, I couldn't post it here, as people who know me personally would still recognize me and the cat would be out of the bag.

I showed the video to a lot of friends, and received positive feedback, but still I was torn:

When user experience design is my vocation, not just my job, what do I do when doing the right thing from a user experience perspective (on behalf of Mac users everywhere, my constituency in this case) can endanger my chances of getting a job as an experience and interface designer at the very company whose policies I'm calling into question?

Very frustrating indeed, but after a few days I have finally decided that if Apple wouldn't hire me because I stood up for the users in opposition to an Apple policy while I wasn't in their employ, then it's not a place I would want to work in the first place. As I mentioned to one of my former Yahoo coworkers: Yahoo would have hired me even if I was a vocal opponent of a Yahoo business practice before starting there, and I wouldn't want to work someplace less cool than yahoo. Let's hope that the people within Apple are more circumspect than Apple-the-company's recent business decisions.

So, without further ado, I give you:

Bait and Switch

Feel free to pass it on.