Just a quick thought on iCloud: I'm not too sure it's going to be very good out of the gate.
Remember how terrible MobileMe was at introduction? It's a lot better now, but iDisk is still god awful. Ping is another cloud service of theirs that's... useless.
All I'm saying is that they don't have a great track record going in to this. I hope I'm wrong, and that iCloud will be awesome and revolutionary, but I also can't help being sort of skeptical.
Discussion about
iCloud Skepticism
I'm quite sure Steve Jobs will be watching this project very closely to ensure that the MobileMe launch fiasco is not reenacted here again. Their infrastructure capacity will probably be very powerful as well - their newly launched data centres will be able to support as much people as possible when the service launches.
Steve Jobs... to ensure... fiasco is reenacted. I think you meant "is *not* reenacted". ;)
Right. :) Fixed that now. I'm quite sure no one (Especially the people at Apple) would want this to happen again – their jobs probably depend on it as well, just like how Larry Page (I think) tied every Googler's bonus to the success of their social strategy.
I'm assuming iCloud's strength will be it's music, and I don't see Apple messing that up. Itunes has always been good when it came to music, it got pretty bloated when it also had to do iPhone/pad syncing.
If they can do what google just did, but also incorporate their itunes store, so that when you buy an album it's instantly in your cloud, and you can burn a copy at home, then this would be the music system to beat.
I do agree that they need to cut the cord too. Being able to shop for Android apps on my computer and sending them to my phone is great, and almost forget the time when I had to plug in my phone to anything but a charger.
If they can do what google just did, but also incorporate their itunes store, so that when you buy an album it's instantly in your cloud, and you can burn a copy at home, then this would be the music system to beat.
I do agree that they need to cut the cord too. Being able to shop for Android apps on my computer and sending them to my phone is great, and almost forget the time when I had to plug in my phone to anything but a charger.
Although I think it's a lot more nuanced a situation than MobileMe sucked + Ping sucked = iCloud will inevitably suck, I do tend to agree that Apple has never been particularly strong on its web and internet side, and they know it. (See: the long term partnership Apple has held with Google.)
It sounds like they've really been investing to get this thing right, but the internet is not yet fully in Apple's DNA (just like the internet IS in Google's DNA, but devices aren't), so we'll see how this goes.
It sounds like they've really been investing to get this thing right, but the internet is not yet fully in Apple's DNA (just like the internet IS in Google's DNA, but devices aren't), so we'll see how this goes.
Yeah, more nuanced as in... eWorld sucked + .Mac sucked + MobileMe sucked + Ping sucked. Don't want to assume anything yet, but let's just say that one would need to forget history to be very excited about this before actually seeing it in real world usage.
Yeah, definitely all good calls. Like I said, Apple has never quite gotten online. I think the thing they understand the least about providing internet services is that they're competing with free, where free is often far superior.
I'm always willing to give companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple the benefit of the doubt, but I wouldn't stake my life on iCloud thing being a slam dunk or anything.
I'm always willing to give companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple the benefit of the doubt, but I wouldn't stake my life on iCloud thing being a slam dunk or anything.
They've invested quite a lot on the infrastructure for the service – I'm quite sure Steve Jobs will not let the programmers get away with delivering a sub-par experience. He *is* a very meticulous manager, and the cloud strategy is quite important at this stage in time because everyone else is launching a similar thing (Google, Amazon, Microsoft perhaps.), and launching a successful version of iCloud is crucial.
Ummmm... how long have you been following Apple? Steve was in charge when .Mac was rolled out and dragged along. He was in charge when MobileMe was rolled out and dragged along. His iron will couldn't prevent the poor programmers and network architects from making laughing stocks of the first 2 tries. Arguably, he is now less in control of everything than he was during the launch of those other two, so, if this does go well, I wouldn't necessarily give him any credit for it. In that event, one might even surmise that his control-freakishness might have been to blame since the most successful launch would have been the one he was least involved in. Just sayin'.
My biggest fear here (not for me since iOS is dead to me, but for the people I inevitably end up supporting) is that iCloud will become the replacement for the computer in the iOS device slavery chain. Presently, you have to have a computer to even use an iOS device properly... for backups, media loading, etc.... If they use this opportunity to make iOS 5 a stand-alone OS like Android, but that can be connected when necessary, that will be good. If they keep the iOS devices as slaves to a master, but just allow you to use iCloud as the master rather than a computer, that will be a big step in the right direction, but not far enough for my taste. Google has this down, and Apple should be humble enough to copy it shamelessly.
I have to agree that Ping was a disappointment though. For those who do not have access to a regional iTunes Store, Ping (Like Genius), does not offer anything at all . Last FM is generally a better music social network as well.
I'd like to disagree with the statement that 'the Internet is in Google's DNA' – you *may* be partially correct, about how Google succeeds well in terms of web apps and services, but for the social aspects of the web, (Google Wave, Orkut, Google Groups, ...) they haven't made as much of an impact or gathered a large amount of following as much as other social networks.
For how 'the Internet is not yet fully in Apple's DNA' – perhaps, but they really have the expertise to launch excellent HTML 5 web apps. Their commitment to HTML 5, development of Safari, and the visual proof of the HTML 5 demos on their website as well as the website refresh are a testament to that.
I'm quite confident that Apple will do an excellent job on iCloud this time – they are definitely determined to do well.
For how 'the Internet is not yet fully in Apple's DNA' – perhaps, but they really have the expertise to launch excellent HTML 5 web apps. Their commitment to HTML 5, development of Safari, and the visual proof of the HTML 5 demos on their website as well as the website refresh are a testament to that.
I'm quite confident that Apple will do an excellent job on iCloud this time – they are definitely determined to do well.
Agreed. However one question I have is in regards to the decisions on hardware / software that Apple is using in their new North Carolina datacenter. Whereas Google is a leader of the pack and uses custom hardware, I'm curious what Apple is doing now that they dropped the X-serve...
For this iCloud thing to work, they need flexible, low-cost storage and hardware. So will they use custom-built OS X servers? That would be interesting, but just as interesting would be for Apple to admit that they're not the best in the cloud business and to learn from others that do it well. Does anyone know what they're actually using?
For this iCloud thing to work, they need flexible, low-cost storage and hardware. So will they use custom-built OS X servers? That would be interesting, but just as interesting would be for Apple to admit that they're not the best in the cloud business and to learn from others that do it well. Does anyone know what they're actually using?
I'm quite sure they still produce XServes for themselves or a secret prototype/version server that they will use in the data centre. It's unlikely that they will reveal their servers to the public - they probably invested quite a lot of money and time developing that, and Google is quite secretive about their servers and backend of their system as well.
It is a little known secret that they have rarely used OS X to run their web services since they push the bulk of their data through Akamai. As I remember it, most of their data has been served from Linux, and there was even a time when some of it was being served by Windows Server. The window of time when data was being served by OS X server was, I believe, a much smaller slice of the pie. I followed this detail casually over the years, but never collated any of the stats, so if someone knows the details, feel free to confirm or deny my claims with a link.
