Apple’s announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function — killing Microsoft.
Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device – just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We’re going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud.”
Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer.
This redefines digital incumbency. The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows
machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.
What this requires from Apple is a bold move that Microsoft would never make: Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential.
Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.
Both companies will be grabbing for data, claiming territory, and leaving Microsoft alone to defend a desktop that will soon cease to exist.
And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined.
Apple and Google will compete like crazy for our data because once they have it we’ll be their customers forever.
This transition will take at most two hardware generations and we’re talking mobile generations, which means three years, total.
With no mobile market share to speak of and Windows 8 not due until 2013, Microsoft is likely to be too late to the party, with much of Redmond’s market cap transplanted eventually to Apple and Google.
Some will say this is unlikely because of Microsoft’s grip on enterprise sales, but consumers have been leading the IT market for the last decade and the mobile transition will only accelerate this trend.
The quicker Microsoft can turn itself into IBM the better for Redmond, because that appears to be their only chance.
Smart comment as always Bob. Love that photo. “old man time” 🙂
Classic Cringely – and I think you may be largely correct. The way I saw it was that they were demoting the Mac to something you do work on rather than the device that holds it all together.
It’ll all come down to marketing. Microsoft already has this sync with Live Mesh, and it couldn’t be simpler. I suspect that people who want this type of sync already have Mesh, but MS will need to get the word out better if they want to grow it and compete with Apple (in this one area).
It has been clear that Steve Jobs derides desktop PCs and has for years – not at all surprising that he would “sacrifice” the Mac, as he’s already thought for years that only a dinosaur would run a desktop PC.
Apple hasn’t innovated anything with iCloud, but they can certainly be expected to package and market it beautifully. If MS loses this battle, it won’t be because of any technology or lack thereof. But I spend a pretty good amount of time showing people Windows features they love once they’re aware of them – and IMO this is where Microsoft falls down. They build beautiful features and then don’t talk enough about them.
This has very little at all to do with marketing. Yes, MS has the cloud but they don’t have the hardware and the right software for the consumer. When was the last time you have seen any consumer line up for a computer or literally sell their kidney for one? I’ve only seen this with the iPad.
MS is going down the dark path by betting on Windows yet again.By Frankensteining a tablet with Windows 8 they’re essentially betting against the post-pc era. Windows has a taint that can’t be removed and they’ll be in a dire situation ten years from now if Ballmer remains CEO.
Saying there’s nothing new here is like saying a house is not new because we already had bricks, boards, and concrete.
Well said Basil.
Yes, this nails it. And, despite what windows apologists will say, the product isn’t ready if people can’t figure out how to use it without excessive geek hand-holding sessions. (Totally agree with motionblurred on this, especially the windows taint. People laugh about how bad Windows is–constantly. Ordinary people, not just geeks like us, reading blogs.
You haven’t considered the “cloud backlash” yet. So far the cloud is the current darling, and we haven’t seen its dark side show up. Just wait for the first customer whose cloud storage gets cracked, and their data either deleted or exposed in some embarassing way. Take a look at the joys Sony has had recently with their Playstation Network – a cloud of a limited function sort.
My data’s not going up in any cloud unless I run it or whoever does can prove to me that the understand and apply the necessary security.
The Cloud is in its honeymoon phase. Disillusionment hasn’t hit, and the work has not yet begun to turn it into something safe enough to be truly useful.
Unfortunately I agree with this sentiment. The “cloud” has yet to be truly tested, maybe a negative attitude but I worry when companies imply it will all work flawlessly, and no real world testing has been done hammering the system and software.
I do have to admit that in concept it makes perfect sense, as Bob states; the network is the computer, or at least its future. Which brings up a secondary concern. Network providers, how much sooner before (insert provider of choice – AT&T, Comcast, etc.) begins to make the cloud experience a pain.
[ connection terminated. bandwidth exceeded. network error: (1222) ]
I agree. The cloud is too new and unknown for many (most?) big users. The change will happen but I feel that it will be at least Cloud 3.0 or later befor it is used by big companies. This is where Microsoft’s strength is so they still have time.
As far as I can see, for the moment at least, Apple views the cloud as a distribution system rather than a storage medium. The whole demo was about showing how iCloud duplicates data across your devices. Of course there are still privacy issues, and synchronising does have a habit of going badly wrong, but iCloud sounds more like a limited form of Dropbox with restricted scope but less setup. G
I do agree with you on this one. For someone who has a desktop, a laptop, an iPhone and iPad buying a song from any of these devices can be a mess. iCloud will blissfully merge and unite all of these separate purchase under my account and allow me to move them anyway I want to from the iCloud service. Ditto for the apps and books I have purchased so far. I still plan to consolidate all of these data on a back up drive at home, just in case.
The “cloud”, when administered by a competent company, is far more secure than a device which users download and install applications from the internet on indiscriminately (or in the case of browser exploits, without even knowing it.)
That said, the biggest danger is in users unintentionally marking private files as public, in much the same way someone accidentally CC’s his whole address book a list of dirty jokes. Because synchronization goes on in the background, it is easy to miss.
Will there be wide scale data breaches? Of course. Will they add up to anything greater than the countless snafus that occur from insecure desktops, I doubt it.
I may not be the first to say it, but Cloud is just IBM Service Bureau all over again. The main difference is SB ran over leased lines, and so was reasonably secure (as secure as the customers would be if each had consolidated data similarly). The InterTubes is inherently insecure, and I’d wager, cannot be made secure with various software dongles. Further, storage and databases are inherently lowest common denominator Up There, since that’s the only way to make money running a Cloud. Economies of scale are whimsical, at best.
Interestingly, Fusion-io is set to IPO this week. This is important not so much for the shares, but for what FIO represents: SSD storage based applications which aren’t (so far as I can determine) based on disk farms. The FIO form factor is one (or may be two) SSD per machine, with server farms.
Google is said to behave similarly; server farms, not storage farms. It’s by no means clear (to me anyway) that monolithic machines make much sense (or convey any advantage) in a Cloud situation. We’ll just have to see.
What you’ve said, Bob, makes perfect sense to me (why couldn’t I see that?!) Microsoft must be in shock right now…
This is one of the least informed articles i’ve read on HN. Microsoft and Google have had cloud-centric data centers in the ground for years. Is apple even finished building theirs in NC yet? Microsoft and Google have been talking cloud for years. Don’t remember hearing anything from Apple until very, very recently. On top of that, PCs/windows has been built on the idea of machine-independent operation since its inception. Apple has been just the opposite. Probably the most closed system in the history of consumer-grade computing. They’re almost entirely consumer market. Virtually no business market. At the law firm where I recently contracted, if you plugged a mac into the network, you were fired. So, if platform becomes irrelevant, who does that hurt more? closed, cloned apples, or genetically diverse, open-hardware Windows? seems like a no-brainer to me. This article and some of its comments seem like they were generated by the iArmy of personas.
Dave,
Where is your law firm? My brother recently graduated from Law School and he’d been a PC guy for 2 decades, he went Mac because fully 70% of the students and staff were on Macs because they were more secure and they’re “up time” was greater. I’ve got two former students in Law school, one if Florida, one in Neveda and they’re seeing the same thing. Virtually all of them have iPhone’s as well…
iCloud concept is great, implementation is going to be the issue. I liked that SJ joked at his own expense about it though. That speaks well for it.
Let me guess, the law firm was named “Ned Ludd & Associates”? I love anecdotes like this. Fired for using a Mac, too funny.
In the very near future, computers in offices will be like clothes, a company will expect you to have them, but will not provide them.
Consumers will drive this trend. Consumers will not tolerate using “dumbed down,” disconnected, versions of the technology they have become accustom to at home. Work and home are becoming one. Our personal lives are becoming so intertwined with our work lives, that we won’t be able to make any distinction between our personal technology and our office technology. Within five years, personal computing devices will become so cheap, ubiquitous and engrained in our personal lives, we’ll ware them like watches. Companies will supply a fast wireless connection to the cloud and maybe a monthly/yearly technology allowance.
In the very near future, computers in offices will be like clothes, a company will expect you to have them, but will not provide them.
Consumers will drive this trend. Consumers will not tolerate using “dumbed down,” disconnected, versions of the technology they have become accustom to at home. Work and home are becoming one. Our personal lives are becoming so intertwined with our work lives, that we won’t be able to make any distinction between our personal technology and our office technology. Within five years, personal computing devices will become so cheap, ubiquitous and engrained in our personal lives, we’ll wear them like watches. Companies will supply a fast wireless connection to the cloud and maybe a monthly/yearly technology allowance.
Citing a law firm run by pointy haired managers who fire people for plugging in a Mac as signifying anything about enterprise is pathetic. iPads are being adopted in the Fortune 500 faster than device to date. The fact that Gates touted tablets as driving out notebooks in 2000 is similar to your argument that Apple is late to the cloud . So what? Microsoft blew the tablet, the internet, and now the cloud. Windows is finally usable though.
Don’t you think that after cloud storage becomes more mainstream, it would only take one sizable misstep by Apple (or Google, or Amazon) to set the movement back? Why not pitch the idea of “home PC as home network?” That’s what I’d prefer to see, anyway. Give me a tower with a powercord, a wireless touch-screen device that when in its charging stand a doubles as a monitor, and a kb/m combo I can leave at my desk… And I would much rather host my content myself.
Throw an extra processor or two in there and let me run multiple devices from this at my home.
That’s the future I want. And it helps to avoid potential bandwidth bottlenecks. by being able to store content locally for recurrent retrieval.
You can do this now if you have a Mac with WebSonar.
With all the hacking in the news, if the cloud servers get hacked, will email and/or password data be stolen as in the sony and epsilon hacks? If so, then what then? Will a ransom be charged to retrieve stolen data by the hackers?
I completely disagree. I thought back in the mid nineties that my parents would never use e-mail, would never but something online. I thought around 2000 that they’d never use the web version of TurboTax. I thought I’d never get over the charming physicality of CDs, DVDs, books. I was wrong about all of these things.
For money and the banks, read data and the cloud. It’s inevitable, and Apple currently make the shiniest ATMs.
Great view – I concur the Cloud is here to stay. Computing is a utility and will be delivered via the cloud. Why would you store data in your home, I would however consider to have a local copy or cache to speed things up – due to my weak ISP connection.
Google already has automatic background sync and backup and it’s been part of Android since day 1.
How well do they work for music or movies? Or for Android OS updates if the carrier says NO which is usually the case?
Feature lists are nice, but people in the real world prefer stuff that actually works to feature lists.
What I don’t understand about the iCloud launch is that they only store certain things (like photos) for a limited time. 1,000 recent pictures isn’t going to make me want to archive my photos on the cloud. 5GB just isn’t enough. There will need to be storage for all the old stuff that we don’t want deleted.
That 5GB is what you get for free. I’m sure Apple will sell you more storage for a reasonable yearly fee.
I think it may be a stretch to say that Jobs/Apple is moving to the iCloud and sacrificing the Mac to kill Windows (though there could be some truth to this), but it does point to the trend away from locally stored data to one housed and managed by a well known company like Apple or Google.
From what I saw, Apple just want to merge OSX with iOS, not to sacrifice OSX. If you watched Win8 demo you should know that MS obsoletes(kills) Windows by themselves, by making it another dos box. And some “revolutionary” features demoed at WWDC are already in Windows/Windows Phone.Only fault at MS side is lack of good marketing and by this bad perception. I think Google should afraid more, they invested heavily in web apps, Chrome OS is one huge bet on web, and it is inconsistent with Android. It looks like native not web is a way to go.
[…] I, Cringely: Apple’s announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and […]
Another silly column from someone who should know better. Apple doesn’t care about killing Windows. They just assume it will happen.
There is an inverse relationship between Apple market share and Microsoft market share. In that context promoting Apple and killing Microsoft mean the same thing
I agree that Apple doesn’t care about killing Windows. What they care about is creating great products and believe there are a lot of people out there that will buy an iPad as their next computer. 90% of those people just happen to be using Windows at the moment. So if Apple kills Microsoft/Windows, it will be a byproduct of creating great products that people want.
Well, part of this goes back to SJ’s idea for computing appliances, back in late 70’s/early 80’s. Apple’s inclusion of network hardware, way back then is also indicative of this.
While the cloud idea is cool (offsite storage ROCKS!), I still like having my own onsite server/cloud. I’ve been pestering Apple for years for a home server and, while iTunes is slowly getting there, it’s still not quite plug and play, for the depth of what I want.
Finally, they’re sacrificing the Mac? If you could go a little more in depth on this, would help understand.
If Apple wanted to kill Windows, it would simply release OS X to all PC users. Another site reported yesterday that Apple has begun to drop ‘Mac” from Lion, and it is simply “OS X – Lion” – so it remains to be seen…
Apple is a hardware company, not a software company. The software they make is designed to support the sale of their hardware. They would not give Mac OS X away free to Windows users because that would sell any hardware.
“Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.”
Um, Android and Chrome already have technologies analogous to all of this, and have for quite some time. Every time I’ve updated my Nexus One to the latest CyanogenMod version, it pulls down all my contacts and email, and reinstalls all my apps. Every time I install Chrome on a new desktop/laptop, Chrome Sync pulls across my bookmarks and preferences.
And truth be told, I trust Google more for cloud security than Apple, simply because they’ve been *doing* it longer.
Except its copying everything, not just changes, which is the big difference (unless they changed the way android operates over the last 4 months)
“And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined.”
And thats where good government regulation could save the world 😉
[…] Apple’s iCloud exists to kill Windows, trap your data […]
Maybe Marc Andreessen’s prediction — that someone would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers” (ca 1998)— is finally coming to pass?
As for cloud storage/access as a reliable part of my day, feh. When the telco monopoly can deliver more than 3Mbits to my house, when I live less than 2 miles from a major research university and with 20 of MSFT itself, I’ll believe it. Not a knock on Apple but on the idea that what works on a corporate campus or even in a densely-populated/well-provisioned test environment will work in the real world.
This was one of my big concerns as well. I don’t mind keeping my Books, Music, and Games in the “Cloud” — but I’m a country boy. “High-Speed Internet” is an Oxymoron where I prefer to live (I’m stuck in New Jersey at the moment … ;p)
Just wait for LTE-Advanced: 100 Mbps to endpoints in motion, 1 Gbps to fixed endpoints. That’s the end of the “last mile” problem. Apple’s priming the pump, so that content is ready to be served when ubiquitous high-bandwidth broadband gets turned on. 2013-14 is my guess.
We’ll get our LTE-Advanced when we get our flying cars.
Reading some of the comments, I guess I’m not the only one paranoid about storing my data in someone’s giant cloud datacenter. It’s a nice companion to local data storage, kind of like email, snail mail and faxing are nice companions, but will it really cause PCs to disappear completely?
“Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.”
This is simply incredible. I honestly thought it was satire when I first read it.
Android is completely decoupled from any PC. It has long received incremental updates over the wire, and cloud backs up most system data, and participating application data. When I activate a new Android device with my account, it automatically pulls that data. It automatically has all of my apps available.
It is extraordinary that someone in the loop like Cringely could fail to see how…behind…Apple actually was. For all of the talk of the post PC era, most of us were already living it. I already have all of my email, photo services, music services, contacts, calendars, and data “in the cloud”. I hope between PCs and they are commodities.
Apple didn’t show anyone the way. Apple opened their eyes.
Where I said “over the wire” I obviously meant “over the air”.
The only time my Android devices ever come into contact with a PC is for development. They have no relationship otherwise with any PC of fat client software.
Android is hardly alone in doing this. This principal has been driving lots of services and platforms for some time. Steam has done this with gaming, and Microsoft later followed with the xbox platform and its cloud potential.
To give credit to Apple for this is a sad, sad indictment of the entire industry.
Slow down there cowboy. My daughter ‘s Android got somewhat fubarred–still working but some features were wonky–and after wasting lots of time with T-mobile tech support they recommended she download some updates to her PC, hook up her Android, and install them from the PC. And they won’t run unless you’re logged in as admin on the PC, nice touch boneheads(although that could be Windows being anal). So the fact that you haven’t had to attach to a PC doesn’t mean we’re done with that paradigm yet.
Now, there’s data, then there’s content. I could (generally) care less about where my Word documents end up or in what form. Hell, I generally write in pure HTML and import it later just to be free to import it where I need.
BUT Apple made itself THE platform for content *creation* – video, audio, graphics. There’s no point in worrying about the cloud storing data if we reach the point where nobody creates the platforms to actually create that data in the first place.
By hinting that the Mac may go away, he has turned his back on the multi-media content generators that were the bread and butter of Apple prior to ipod/itunes, and THAT market will have little choice but to go back to Microsoft if Jobs continues to suggest that he no longer cares about them.
In short, either this backfires on him because it keeps Windows alive as a content-generation platform, OR it backfires on him because he’s creating a cloud that nobody has a plaform for generating polished content for. the ipad is great for many things, but it lacks the memory, processing power, and inputs necessary for most multi-media work today.
i’ve seen cloud-based image-processing apps (piknik, recently purchased by google). they’re extremely slow and buggy, and require too much as even with HTML 5, the amount of power needed is too much for Javascript interpretation so either you’re ajax-roundtripping (too slow) or you’re in flash (too slow).
Wrong, he said demoted NOT fired. Macs will continue to sell and be sold as is. Just the way you interact with your data, music, photos will be changed forever. We will all happily create graphics, video, photos, docs, etc. on our macs. But we can do it on any of them. Not just the one plugged in at your desk at home.
Clearly you missed the intro of the new, way cheaper, way more powerful and easy to use version of Final Cut Pro that Apple announced a couple of months back. If you think that content creators will go back to Windows, you are sadly mistaken.
I guess Microsoft’s cloud for consumer, Live Sync, doesn’t count? Bob hates Microsoft and anytime he sees them late to the party he wants to the be the sage that predicts their demise.
“The Apple Cloud” isn’t anything new or revolutionary like the iPhone or iPad. I’m not surprised Bob didn’t talk about the fact that Apple wasn’t first to the “cloud” game since he’s really a Apple Fanboy.
And as far as “Data Lockup”… well, anyone stupid enough to use a service that takes their data hostage deserves what they get in the end.
[…] iCloud’s real purpose is to kill Windows And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined. […]
As Cringley says, it’ll take a few more hardware cycles. That means Windows and Mac OS X will be around for at least another decade.
However, Microsoft does have plenty of problems. Its biggest is internal politics. Windows Phone 7 is a marvelous little phone OS with some nifty features. Unfortunately, the Windows Team will do their best to kill it. Why Windows **PHONE** 7. Because it won’t be allowed on tablets. That’s desktop Windows job! Heck, as far as the Window desktop team is concerned, Windows Phone 7 is a temporary solution until Windows 8 or 9 is available for phones.
The enterprise is reevaluating the “computer for every desktop” philosophy. After all, an iPad could probably do 90% what most workers do (I mean besides playing solitaire and surfing the web). The ubiquitous Windows network connecting all those desktop PCs is vulnerable to malware and spyware. What if you shrink down that network to just the servers? What if all of the PCs became iPads and were treated the same way your bank treats your PC? You’re allowed access to your bank information, do lots of stuff, but only at a distance. Your bank doesn’t trust you to connect directly to their network.
Once that happens, Microsoft will become another Woolworth’s. At one time, Woolworth was the largest company in the U.S. However, they couldn’t compete against the discount houses. In the end Woolworth’s refused to adopt (after all, they had a successful business plan!) and went out of business.
The irony is that Microsoft killed off one of its babies (MS-DOS) to allow another (Windows) to thrive. That allowed Microsoft (which was smaller than Apple before Windows came out) to become the behemoth we now think of it. Ironically, Jobs is willing to let Mac (the very thing that defined Steve Jobs) whither in order to allow iOS to prosper.
Sadly, it is more likely that Mac OS X will survive than Windows. You’ll always need desktop iron to do things that iOS won’t allow you to do. The big power of iOS is that it is limited because limiting it makes it more useful. To get around those limits, there’s the Mac.
Windows, on the other hand, needs the corporate desktop. Once Windows is out of the corporate desktop, the question will be why keep it in the backend where Linux is cheaper and more flexible? The consumer market will move towards iOS (and Android) and so will most of the corporate market. Backend will be Linux. Developers will use Mac OS which is nicer than the Linux desktop and has all the same tools you find on Linux.
Microsoft needs to move quick. They should redub Windows Phone 7 something other than Windows and drop the “Phone”. They can call it ZuneOS or even Ralph — just not Windows. This needs to be the OS for Microsoft’s tablet. Microsoft should allow the OEMs the flexibility they currently have on Windows, but limit the tablet and phone OS like they do now for Windows Phone 7.
Then, they need to get their tablets into the hands of Dell and hopefully HP (if it isn’t too late) and push this to the corporate enterprises as the Windows alternative.
I’ve always speculated why Apple got Papermaster. They’ve been planning a long time how to get all of the devices (starting with iOS devices) to play nice with the new, big data center(s). I think, at the time, it was his experience in the areas of large system integration that made them think he would be a good catch.
When the iPod came out Apple already was planning for the “future” of net computing. The technology at the time could only profitably make a “pod” with iTunes only “ripping” software, but surely the goal all along was to get to the point of selling content directly, building up the infrastructure in cycles, driving the costs down, and getting more data (any kind) in the proprietary Apple net, and make killer devices that people will want to use to run the killer apps (which now come every week on the Apple app store.) If the product cycles are now those of mobile products, the app developing cycle has become like candy sales.
So when they hired Papermaster for device hardware head, I think they were really thinking how all Apple devices will join with iCloud. And, how Apple can maintain (and grow) their profitability while doing so. Ever wonder why Apple would “snoop” on how people were using iOS devices? I think they were looking to see how much use of the data center (iCloud) they could give away with the price of each device sold. Remember the DRM imposed 5 computer limit for purchased music from iTunes? Gone, that is, after proving to the record labels that DRM wasn’t really worth it. That’s also a good example of how Apple has learned to learn from the behavior of its OS endusers and customers – and use that knowledge to “inform” the content providers to make agreements with Apple they don’t make with others.
Bob, when you wrote about the iPod and iTunes a long time ago you wondered if it was like selling the razor or the blades. Selling which would make the company most profitable? They are giving away data, which had been previously considered restricted content in iTunes, so all your devices are inherently synched. Apple is now basically giving away storage space if you run iOS 5.
They’re making money off of selling content like media and apps, but they know where the real profit is. They are also willing to invest money upfront in giving their already profitable devices any edge.
Overall, the interplay at Apple of restraint (until tech matures) and capitalizing (profiting) on methodical innovation has been kind of admirable.
When the iPod came out there were other MP3 players and none of them were compatible with Macs. It seems far more likely that the iPod was intended primarily to make sure Macs had compatible devices.
Then, the music industry thought we might as well let them sell music since it is only to Macs. At least that was until Apple made a copy of iTunes for Windows.
Apple recent success is certainly attributable in part to strategy but there is also a lot of old fashioned luck involved.
I absolutely agree that the success was the result of a lot of luck. That is, the success in many areas like sales on iTunes, the iPod, and the App Store was much more than even Apple hoped. Much of it was unprecedented. But I get the feeling there is some kind of strategy that they’re always in the process of feeling out how to refine it. And, their profit margins on their products, especially the iPhone, is not the result of luck but a lot of forward thinking when it comes to the supply chain.
Not to be confrontational, but when iTunes came out before the iPod saw the light of day, several third party mp3 players did worked with it. And before iTunes there were a few apps that played mp3s on Macs and synched with players.
I’m curious to know, when Apple went into iPod/iTunes, what were they thinking long term? I bought a iBook in mid-2001 (pre-iPod) and it came with a Rio player basically for free. They gave away an mp3 player.
Also, I wonder what they really did tell the music industry back then when they started iTunes? Remember iTunes came with free music, I think about 50 songs that had no DRM other than you couldn’t burn it to CD more than 7 times or something like that. They gave music away.
So, at first they gave us free music to try on a basically free mp3 player which they didn’t make. At that point it was all about promoting iTunes itself. Get people into it with the least amount of resistance (free player, free music.)
They likely did this all the time knowing they were going to try to sell the iPod for a premium price. I wonder when they considered selling music? iTunes first came out in early 2001 (after buying out SoundJam) but it wasn’t until 2003 that the iTunes Store opened. Did they go looking to buy SoundJam or Audion with eventual sales in mind? Did they negotiate with the record labels to include free songs with iTunes knowing they wanted to compete with the industry’s usual sellers?
Is that history something to be mindful in looking at the current rollout of iCloud?
Back then, music files were the easiest example of digital content infrastructure to implement first. Small file size compared to other content, sound processing much less than video processing. Perfect to download for use later. The iPod only had to be a pod.
Jobs may have killed the Newton but I’m pretty sure they didn’t stop R&D on tablets. AppleTV might be a “hobby” but I’m sure they’ve been testing a variety of TV/Computer hybrids for years – Bob keeps saying Apple will be coming out with a real TV set (though I don’t think so, TVs are not nearly as profitable as other consumer electronics, like phones.)
They’ve been thinking and playing with these ideas for a while – when they pull the trigger and, maybe more importantly, when they don’t, is interesting to me.
The great uncertainty in the future growth of all these cloud implementations (not just from Apple) is the stranglehold the ISPs have on data transmission – now that they think they’re content providers too and have competing content distribution agendas.
Just to correct the misinformation in your post, I had been using MP3 players (the last one being a Diamond Rio 500) on my Mac for three years before the iPod came out. SoundJam was the software that transferred music to the Rio. SoundJam, of course, was bought by Apple and became iTunes.
> I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.
That was a joke right? Google’s had this for years. It’s Apple that’s playing catch up, introducing to the iPhone stuff that Android users have taken for granted from day 1.
And for the most part Google has the superior cloud offering – I can use Android or a Chromebook or I can log into Gmail and Docs from anywhere using anything that’ll run a web browser. Apple’s stuff is locked into Apple hardware.
Maybe but it doesn’t work that way for me. I recently upgraded my Android phone from 2.1 to 2.2 (let’s not even get into the availability of updates). Sure, my GMail stuff was still there and it mostly knew which apps to download from the market again. However most of the rest of my setup was gone. Any contact information not stored in GMail was gone. All my custom ringtones were gone, etc. etc. It took me half a day to get my phone back to the way it was before the update.
At least Apple knows how to play catchup with the market, even if they try to spin it as innovation.
In some sense, this is just Steve doing what he said he’d do before he returned:
“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.”
— Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996
@dennis. Tell me dennis what version of android are you running?
I remember a Microsoft commercial from about 6-7 years ago, where an Microsoft engineer speaks a command, a bird avatar appears on screen, the engineer tell’s it to add an appointment to his calendar and it disappears. What Happened to that ? Voice computing has to be the next thing. Typing and touch screen are nice, but… still ineffective. I know there are some great apps out there for this, but they’re really not mainstream yet. I’m excited to see what Dragon dictation can do on the iDevices. But, when we can speak to our devices, cloud based or not, and have them do what we want them to do – consistently – then we’ll have it all.
Apple isn’t doing anything new, or revolutionary. Just another typical Apple fanboy post that is not only ignorant, but funny.
Apple needs to stick to what it does well, making devices.
The Apple bubble will burst soon enough, and things will return back to normal.
Enjoy the darkness of denial, then when the sun rises you can forget that it was Apple that made it happen. Your argument has a small kernel of technical correctness, but is missing the big picture. Someday (what we call) computing will look very different than today, but its form will be largely shaped by what Apple is doing now.
You must be blind, deaf and…I won’t go there. Nothing revolutionary? How many people are using the cloud, as a percentage of the population, on a daily basis? Google may have had this or that and MS may have Live or Mesh or whatever they call it, but few people use it. iCloud will work with all your devices because it will just work. No set up. Not accounts to try and figure out on each device. Apple already has 220M CC accounts! How many does MSFT have? Or Google? A pittance compared to Apple. The iPad. Heard of it? Nothing revolutionary. Yeah. iPhone, iPad will synch in seconds. Did you not see the demo? That is real and people will use it every day of their lives. MSFT and Google may have the technical side worked out but if they don’t have the devices that work with it, who is going to use it? People, lots of people, have to actually use a technology or it might as well be dead. Jobs is brilliant and pushing the industry like never before. He is leading while Google sits back with no devices of their own to make money off of, and MSFT can’t get a tablet to market until…2013??? MSFT is dead. Ballmer should be fired.
Swing and a miss Bob. The cloud isn’t close to being ready for primetime and consumers will learn soon about the security risks. Bandwidth is a monster issue. There is a big difference from the bandwidth iOS needs versus a full Mac or PC. Wait until Comcast gets hit with the bandwidth demands of full cloud storage.
iCloud smells too much like MobileMe 2.0 — another attempt by Apple after .mac in the older days. And Apple is offering a whole 5GB of free storage! Wow! That will sure replace my 1TB drive in my Mac.
I agree with about Apple trying to own the world so to speak, and I am an Apple fan. But their success has always centered around cool devices and proprietary solutions along with being first on the block. For the cloud, they are showing up late to the party and their past attempts (MobileMe) they have a terrible track record.
I love Apple products. But I also have no plans to trade in my laptop for an iPad. And I really have no plans to store my data, music, photos, etc in the Cloud.
— And I really have no plans to store my data, music, photos, etc in the Cloud.
You’re something of a Techie (you’re here, after all). For civilians, who treat computing *devices* like toasters (many have rudimentary microprocessors!), which is Steve’s meme, then flummoxing them into believing that iCloud is cheaper and safer, etc. will be easy. Steve says so.
Whether CIOs will be so dumb is an open question. Many experienced hands, from the Boomer Generation, are leaving or being tossed. These folks have the institutional memory to recognize baloney, since said baloney was trotted out years ago with Bad Results. The Gen?-ers are to dumb and gullible to exercise independent thought. Sheeple is the generic description.
Isn’t Google way ahead of Apple on cloud integration already? They already have all of my emails all of my contacts all of my diary a goodly bunch of my files floating around up there and android devices are plugged right into it.
Every so often I get nervous about handing so much of my life over to one outside party but the convenience of being able to access anything from anywhere is very hard to turn down.
Just for sake of curiosity, do you really believe in what you just wrote?
[…] Robert X. Cringely, about iCloud: What this requires from Apple is a bold move that Microsoft would never make: Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential. […]
But – the whole point of the article isn’t for you or me (heck – I’m a developer and I’ve got 4 TB on my desktop – that’s not all going Cloud on me) … its about Jane and Joe consumer and their “fun data” – recent pictures, music on the move, mobile games, social media, all that kind of stuff.
I have SACDs and DVDa s for surround sound – Its robust and reliable and sounds GREAT – but on the metro or in the car – a phone/pod device with MP3s or similar digital files is good enough. And my younger co workers don’t have any discs – its all digital all the time for them …
The masses is where this stuff is going and for as long as they are buying in mass quantities, the coolest toy with the best marketing wins!
And Apple does make very nice candy.
I agree with the consumer devices moving the the cloud. Not so sure on the enterprise; I don’t see them moving their SQL databases to the cloud anytime soon. But I do see consumer devices making inroads into the enterprise, with more enterprises wanting ISVs (like the company I work for as a dev) supporting devices like tablets. One of the things I’ve read about Microsoft’s Win8 is that they are pushing HTML5 / Javascript development really hard. This makes sense to me. I think enterprises will put a lot of pressure on their ISV suppliers to make the “userland” side of the ISV software to support browser front ends everywhere. As this happens, then enterprises can ditch the traditional laptop in favor of lightweight devices like tables or netbooks (of any vintage – iOs, win8, Adroid, etc.). But I still see the backends at enterprises being traditional servers and server OSs for quite a while yet, not cloud based.
> OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap),
Oh so very wrong, Bob. It’s not the 30 bucks, it’s the tying of the leash.
From now on, every Mac OS install has to be linked to an iTunes account, with a credit card behind it. Want updates, insert account password (so, no passing copies around).
How did that 1984 video go, again?
They’re going to have to pry my data from my cold dead fingers before I trust ANY of them with my information. You think your data is locked down with a Windows or a Mac? Christ, can’t wait to see what’ll happen when it’s Apple’s iCloud.
What have you got against Microsoft or do you just want to see the stock go lower or Apple’s higher?
Windows Phone 7 and Nokia plus Windows 8 plus XBox in the living room place Microsoft in a very strong position in the future. While you’ve been arguing they should throw in the towel and become a Venture Capitalist they’ve actually been doing a lot of really good work.
In fact you could argue it’s Apple who quite frankly have been looking like they’ve ran out of ideas (except making things cheaper and faster) that look to be beginning that inevitable slow down a big company has when it looses it’s visionary leader. Microsoft loosing Gates before as an example.
Windows 8 and Phone 7 look awesome for everything from tablets to PCs to phones and design wise is starting to really lead the way. Something Apple haven’t done in 4 years. I suspect a lot of Mac ex PC (who probably still duel boot Windows7 anyway) will start to move back.
As for iCloud, that may have been their aim however it will be like FaceTime. A really cool piece of tech but with no Windows client (the apps it uses are all Mac) not a whole lot of use to most people.
Says an iPhone developer writing this on a Mac Book Pro.
As for Android, Google can only copy interfaces it’s not in their DNA so they aren’t going to do anything great plus with fragmentation and their store being a joke, I already know a few people moving over from Android to iPhone just for the Apps – If developers can’t make money they will stop making products.
You heard it here first but expect Microsoft in 3 years to be the Number 1 phone with Android in third place. The where will Apple be?
I do wish though that Microsoft opens up native development
I wonder if Rush Limbaugh was reading from your column … as he confirmed / affirmed / practically shouted your central thesis toward the end of his program today.
Google is already doing this with Chrome OS (only thing to backup and sync is bookmarks, “web apps”, saved passwords, etc.). I think Google is 1-up’ing Apple here because no where yesterday did Apple introduce cloud-platform applications. Steve complained that people only think of the cloud as a disk in the sky, but that really is all Apple sees it as, a disk with some small sync software. Google sees the cloud as a delivery platform, to store data but also to deliver applications. Apple has yet to make a web-based iTunes or a web-based iMovie. Until they do, Apple still be tied to the Mac/iOS/etc.. and never really jump fully to the cloud (this is of course, because everything Apple does is tied to hardware sales).
Windows or desktops in general aren’t dead or being replaced by tablets. PCs might be however 🙂
Windows 8 will mostly be bought for tablets however it will dock to give you access to a mouse and keyboard whenever proper work needs done similar to an iPad. In fact due to Windows 8’s ability to run Windows 7 apps (albeit with an Intel chip) Microsoft are trying to make it as easy as possible.
Both Apple are taking a similar approach with Apple stronger in the short term due to their head start however Microsoft much stronger in the long term. Ultimately the iPad is good but the fact the tablet and the PC both run the same OS with Windows makes transitioning to a tablet only environment much easier for Windows customers than Mac who have to re-buy all their old apps.
People have been howling Apple is dead for as long as I remember. It did wonders for the company. Maybe if we started howling MS is dead, they’ll recover!!
Let competition rule. I as a consumer am very selfish and always want more. So I want a healthy MS to keep Apple and Google on their toes.
Good one bob. You in the bay area this week?
The article completely ignore’s Google’s efforts for data freedom.
https://www.dataliberation.org/
One could argue that this google effort is not a legitimate effort, but they at least talk the talk about not building walls around the google garden.
I don’t know.
I think Microsoft is doomed to die a slow death, much like Christianity.
IBM has a cloud. Did you know that? The intent of there cloud is for customers to move their applications and data to a cloud. It is based on the same mindset as IBM’s web hosting (ebusiness) and utility (On-Demand) computing. The flaw is IBM never provided a “service.” Microsoft has a cloud and in a sense it is like IBM’s. Apple’s iCloud is a true “service.” A service does something of value for people.
Becoming more like IBM won’t help Microsoft. Firms like Google and Apple are changing how IT is used and how business is done. In my opinion both IBM and Microsoft are about to be left in the dust.
Everything old is new again.
When I was in college, I and my fellow students stored all of our data (class papers, programming assignments, email, etc.) in the campus “cloud” aka the cluster of VAX 780s in the Computer Center. None of us liked doing this, because the systems were regularly hacked, there was lots of downtime, and worst of all, we were evicted from the “cloud” every summer. But we did so out of economic necessity, because a PC in those days cost most of a year’s tuition, but the “cloud” was free to us.
Eventually, PCs got cheap enough that everyone has one (or two or three), all of our data became decentralized. College campuses no longer have clusters of large computers, only the communications network remains.
I believe the natural inclination of most people to store data decentralized, but corporate and vendor interests fight this inclination for want of control or to try to sell us their product or service.
The only reason we need the “cloud” now is our current crop of computing and communications devices are not yet powerful enough to meet our desire for full decentralization. The devices will eventually get there, and the “cloud” will pass into history along with the VAX 780, client/server computing, X terminals, and Windows 95. But vi will live on forever.
I stopped reading at the mention of Google following Apple with a cloud offering. I always knew Cringely was a fanboi but not an uninformed blogger.
anyone who uses “fanboy” (or even “hater”) is disqualified from intelligent discussion.
And why is that?
Don’t be stupid, most people are fans of something, it’s more than fair qualify someone who is a fan of a company as a fanboy.
Ed is absolutely right, and Diego disqualified himself just as thoroughly by calling him “stupid” when, in fact, Ed is 100% correct.
I’ve always found it morbidly fascinating that anyone who is passionate about a product is subject to pejorative labels like “fanboy.” I mean, seriously… Heaven forbid that (a) a company consistently innovates and produces products that customers love, and (b) customers express that they love those products.
Anyone who uses those terms is indeed disqualified from intelligent discussion.
Well well well. Check out James and Ed, the self-appointed arbiters of “intelligent conversation”.
Time to join the ranks of the disqualified.
I was a proud Amiga fanboy back in the day…
@Freeman
And tawani dismissing Cringely’s entire thesis because he is a “fanboi” is intelligent discussion how?
Call a spade a spade instead of encouraging mindless counterpoints.
My test for “fanboy” is to ask whether the person can mention any disadvantages or weaknesses in the product they so much love.
Likewise one can ask a “hater” for any strengths of the product the so much despise.
I use RIM, ipad, macbook pro, windows 7, android 2.3.3 and love them all for their strengths but I also love to diss them about their shortcomings.
What about “biased”?
Ed Ever, you got it right. The closed minded have nothing to offer. I’ve seen enough criticism of every order from RXC to know he isn’t a closed minded fanboy of any sort. Apple doesn’t do everything perfect and even Steve J has shaken his head at the likes of MobileMe. It is the closed mindedness of MS that is bringing it down. The likes of Ann Coulter are replicated in the guise of AppleHaters with their distorted views that bring little to the table of intelligent discussion in any forum.
Fortunately, there will be other companies such as Google and its siblings and HP to name but two, I am sure, with offerings to Apple Haters. Some will learn from Apple as Apple will observe and learn from them; something, sadly, MS wasn’t able to do and shall wither away because of it.
Why do people say cloud computing is new? Salesforce.com introduced the idea WAY back in 1999. Welcome to the party Apple, you’re only about 10 years too late.
Why would you assume that just because the idea isn’t new, that Apple is “too late”? In fact, Apple has shown that they can enter a market “late” and make significant improvements to it (i.e. MP3 players and smartphones).
Apple’s main strength is timing. It generally doesn’t matter if they’re “late” or not first, they tend to do things at just the right time where manufacturing, distribution and cost are favorable for them and they can bring a product to market at a point where their profits are maximized. A given technology has to be good enough and cheap enough for them to go forward.
A Short History of Apple’s iCloud
Apple’s first offering in the cloud was in January 2000. At that time it was called iTools. Improvements were made and the name was changed to .Mac two years later, and then to MobilMe in 2008. Now more improvements are made and the name changes once more, this time to iCloud.
Google Docs was launched in 2005. Salesforce (the product) was launched a few months after Apple’s iTools in 2000.
Geez, glad Apple didn’t listen to you or they wouldn’t have created the iPod, iPhone or iPad. 10 years too late? What a stupid or uniformed thing to say. I guess Microsoft shouldn’t have entered the OS business either since they weren’t the first. Did Porsche or BMW build the first car? Wow, nice work, Sherlock.
it’s just a twist on the old datacenter vs PC thing again. this time, however, you don’t know who/where the datacenter is, so you can’t look up the guru and beg him to run your card deck before 5 PM.
You nailed it. What’s old is new again. Only this time there is no (apparent) controls in place. The real story is where are these data centers and who is controlling them? What rights will you have to your own data? Who else has access to your data? I could go on, but bah, who cares anymore. Hey look! Bright and shiny!
Back in the early 1980s before the microprocessor got off the ground, and well before the first Mac and the first IBM PC went commercial there was “remote computing” or timesharing. It was massive mainframes in data centers linked to remote terminals at companies.
The terminals were dumb terminals and a company named Wang led the world in their sale.
This timesharing and centralized storage of data was the real precursor to “cloud computing.”
Spoken like a tried and true Multics fan. Although I don’t think terminals were dominated by Wang; they made and sold mini-computers, with a word processing application being what made them/him rich (well, that and core memory). Into the late ’80s anyway, the DEC VT-XX0 were everywhere; their emulation was just about the first available on PCs.
Agree with the point that it is becoming all about data. I think what you are not saying is that Microsoft is already doing the same thing that you suggest Apple is doing, and surprisingly in a much more open way. Alas not well advertised, they already do almost everything Apple announced yesterday. Google is doing it as well, so Apple is far from being the only choice out there.
A few years ago all online Microsoft services were platform centric, you could use them only on Windows devices, but today they are not. Look at all products that came out of Microsoft in the past 2-3 years and you will see a steady move towards standards, open source, interoperability.
A few years ago Apple seemed the right choice, but yesterday it seemed like they just displayed the new thicker and higher walls they built around their ecosystem. It looked like: if you want to use our services you have to use our devices, our OS, etc. this is so Microsoft in 2005, really disappointing to be coming from Apple.
I find that an arrogant proposition from Apple, especially since there are so many excellent options out there for both hardware and software, and with a good level of integration; this is not 2007 when the only decent phone on the market was the iPhone, you really cannot be arrogant for much longer.
I think yesterday also showed the cracks in the iOS UX. Patching iOS to integrate Twitter only complements the WP7 design and frankly looks like a crutch. Apple needs to rethink the UX the way Microsoft did with WP7 and Google did with Android. What was cool in 2007 is no longer cool in 2010.
On the desktop, does the $29 upgrade includes the $69 upgrade to get the Magic Trackpad? How many ways do I need to see what applications I am running? How does Apple decide that I need one or two more ways with every release of their OS. Is someone obsessed with that at Apple?
Overall, to me Apple delivered underpar, and in some areas shifted from innovating into catching-up.
“Alas not well advertised, [Microsoft] already [does] almost everything Apple announced yesterday.”
Wherein lies the rub. Think “advertised” as meaning, “available to mere mortals thru some ‘advertised’ network service.” That would throw the ball back in Microsoft’s court, where it has long been.
Of course, Microsoft, together with their 927,000 Sharepoint consultants and a host of IT committees, CAN do anything. They just have yet to wrap it in a consumer-friendly package.
Asymco (Horace Dedieu) has astutely picked up that Android makes Google very little money, and forces shops like BlackBerry to work with others, limiting their revenues perhaps as much as it enhances them. It’s time for Microsoft to recognize that their pitiful phone effort is costing them much more in revenues for Office (-like) products, sharing services etc. A first-class Office suite* should be competing with iWork on every iPad, but that would apparently diminish the prospects of the tablets that Microsoft hopes it will sell in 2013.
Microsoft has volunteered, both by tying itself to the PC era and by bureaucratic slowness in the mobile space, to be irrelevant to new development outside of the corporate Enterprise.
* (Pure iPad conventions; no mouse, please.)
Microsoft’s service available to mere mortals called Live Mesh. It was around since 2008. Unfortunately, it’s far from what it had to be ( http://85mph.posterous.com/apple-icloud-microsofts-huge-misstep-up-again ), however, Microsoft did similar things and did that before Apple.
It’s already here…
Zunepass, all your music is in the cloud, played on all your devices (pc, zune, xbox, windows phone).
Windows Live Mesh already syncs your data across the web & all your windows devices.
Office Live syncs docs and gives you access on the web, phone, pc.
Hotmail, calendar & contact sync exist in Windows live & Exchange.
Windows phone already auto uploads all your photos (to facebook or skydrive), which are stored online and synced with Photo Gallery on a pc.
Que?
Apple showed in several slides that it connected to iTunes on Windows, and Outlook on Windows. Far from Apple only devices.
Hate to say this, but Cringely is correct. It’s getting to the point that besides any special applications that you can’t get on a iOS device, the Mac is essentially just a development platform/server/heavy lifter OS(?) for any iOS device. Then Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) essentially merges some UI guidelines and concepts from iOS and iOS 5 gained a piece of Mac OS X architecture (Core Image). I may be wrong, but as I see it, you will see a slow, gradual transition where iOS will be the dominant OS and Mac OS X may be become either more of a server OS or it may just “fade away”. Does anyone agree with that assessment and whether you do or not, why?
When Steve Jobs unveiled Mac OSX on stage in 2000, he said “this will be our operating system for the next ten years.” Released to consumers in 2001, that means that a Lion in 2011 puts them right on schedule with Steve’s master plan, as Lion is the King of all cats and may be the last OSX as we know it.
Look up Steve’s Macworld 2000 keynote on Youtube and you’ll see what I mean. Even ten years ago, he at least had a grand plan of where Apple would be at today, and he only intended Mac OSX to last for a decade.
Astute, Jonas Brother. I remember Steve saying that. Thanks for the reminder. I wonder what path to the future MS had lying round, at the time; doubt it had anything other than “we’re on top”.
Fear must dominate the sleep of all the giants.
I, among a handful of intelligent people, have made the case that a transition to “mobile” form factors will require a re-thinking of data storage. The age old (back at least to COBOL screens) meme that a file exists to populate a screen will finally be supplanted by real RDBMS; the reason being that data has to be minced up into small enough coherent pieces that can be displayed and updated just by picking/gesture/whatever (where “whatever” explicitly isn’t any kind of keyboard).
Only question I have is how will they get those huge mega video cards into those small spaces and keep them cooled? Gamers still want what they cant get from a phone or a pad device.
Gamers are already moving to consoles and mobile spaces.
Spoken like someone who is at most a console/casual gamer. That is, at best only marginally informed about the topic.
I certainly am not going to give up my gaming PCs in favor of a console sporting inferior hardware that will either break or have it’s network hacked, and I’d rather light myself on fire than play FarmVille or any of those other LCD casual titles.
I’d also prefer a gas can, a match, and a straw suit to becoming one of Job’s Eloi. If it breaks, I want to be able to fix it myself, and if it gets a little dated, I want to upgrade it myself. I’m sure that a curated computing experience works for some folks, and more power to them, but I personally can’t even stand the amount of control that Apple exerts over my iPod.
@telestar Then why did you buy an iPod. You could have bought a zune and not have to deal with the control you hate. Or just use an android device, or use a number of many different solutions out there. Some people (and I mean some no matter what OS or hardware you run) people will research what will do what they want but most won’t but, no matter what they choose, it is THEIR choice and just because they chose different then you that is no reason to be obnoxious about it.
Aww. Did I hurt someone’s feelings? I don’t have to justify my tech choices to you, nor does it matter to me what your tech choices are. And quite frankly, given the extraordinarily BAD global citizen that Apple is (read about any Chinese Apple factory “no-suicide” contracts lately?) what you think of my opinion about Apple and it’s control issues is utterly devoid of meaning to me. Please go back to sorting your Steve Jobs wallpapers until the Morlocks come for you.
Mostly an ok article and a great look on the future, but
“Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.”
Where have you been? Google has had docs, synced chat (Talk), and media syncing (picasa) for years…
The one major, gigantic difference between what Apple is doing and what Google has done with things like GDocs and GMail, is that Apple is (IMO) properly separating things into the appropriate MVC (model/view/controller). Your data being the model, OSX and iOS being the view, and the controller being the invisible software that manages all the synchronization.
Google, on the other hand, has smashed them all together, so you have to do all your work in a browser using (again, IMO) poorly defined and hard to use UI elements, and they never even tried to solve the controller (managing synchronization) because everything ran through the browser so why bother.
Thus, what Apple is doing and what Google are doing are vastly different.
The problem I have with Google’s vision is that the browser in general, and HTML in particular, are an extremely poor way to manage views. HTML is, essentially, a different incarnation of LaTeX. The fact that you can do something interactive like G-Mail or G-Docs is an amazing technical feat given the limitations of what a browser and HTML are. I mean, I’m sure I could turn LaTeX or Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word into a first person shooter gaming engine if I and fellow engineers worked hard enough at it, I’m just not sure it would be the best use of our time.
And before folks defend HTML/the browser as being “open” and “cross-platform”, just keep in mind that none of the browser platforms actually “just work”. IE7/8/9, Safari, Chrome, FireFox, or (god forbid) Opera all have different levels of support. You do *not* “write once” for the web. And it won’t end. Just as the majority of HTML5 features get “close” to being supported everywhere, HTML”6″ will throw it into chaos again.
HTML is a subset of SGML, just as xml is. SGML was created by lawyers to print law books. 99.44% of what goes into the “UI” of a web page is done with javascript, not HTML. MS killed DHTML just because they wanted VBScript to win. It didn’t. Some people think javascript is peachy keen.
Your major point, that HTML is just a layout syntax (calling it or the original SGML a “language” is a bit rich) is spot on. Applets were supposed to give us a programmable interface, and they did. Nobody noticed, outside of Fortune X00 intranets.
Windows is dying a natural death, no one has to kill it. It was never innovative, never easy to use, never even cheap — it generated its own ecosystem of IT symbiotes that kept it alive. It was just DOS in disguise and no one will miss it.
“… never even cheap…” – compared to what, to a loaf of bread? Sure. Compared to OSX? Get real, you get a cheap upgrade because you paid for it twice the price of Windows when you bought your Mac. Don’t fool yourself, Jobs is not into the business of giving away cheap software.
Not cheap? It cost less to buy a barebones PC and buy a full version of Windows than it is to buy a Mac. You pay premium when you buy a mac.
How silly. You pay a premium when you buy a good machine with corresponding support whether it is a Mac or PC. We have decades of experience with barebones machines which are only a bargain if you leave it in its box and marvel at the low price. Unfortunately for your claim we were not born yesterday.
There has never been a computer that is “easy to use”. ALL users MUST be taught how to use a computer. ALL consumer level boxes are keyboard+mouse, and use the exact same UI metaphors. Just because you are comfortable using a computer, now, does NOT mean that someone who has never before seen a computer will be able to sit down and start working it without assistance.
Again, NO computer is “easy to use”, and ALL computers have a learning curve that is tightly dependent on the skill of the teacher. I say this having learned to use computers at the tender age of 7 … operating a teletype terminal hooked up to the MIT mainframe back in ’68. Since then I’ve used pretty much every type of system this planet has produced, and they are ALL the same … confusing to someone who knows nothing about them and has no help, but simple to operate for anyone with ANY computing experience. Macs and Winboxen are identical.
“There has never been a computer that is “easy to use”.”
That’s why iOS is doing so well – it powers simpler devices that are radically easier to use than a “computer”.
Yes, all general purpose computers are flexible, and thus complex devices that require some effort to learn how to use. But given that, they aren’t the same. For example, I have a FreeBSD server at home that, while wonderful for many things (fantastic firewall and RAID/NAS server) is far from easy to use – it takes a while to learn your way around the ports, /etc/rc.d, etc. And while Windows is much better than it used to be, it’s still a bit more complex to deal with than a Mac – if nothing else, you don’t have to deal with the issues caused by the fragmented PC hardware, where users are responsible for juggling OS updates, drivers, game patches, etc., and of course there’s anti-virus software. Windows and Mac are closer than they were a decade ago certainly, but they’re not “the same” to non-technical users.
If we’re not talking about desktops, then we’re not talking about Windows.
If all we’re talking about are one-trick ponies, like handhelds, then, sure, they are “easier” to use than the more complex big boxes, but then, driving a tricycle is far easier than driving a semi, too.
You and the others who claim there is a difference in the “ease of use” between Macs and Winboxen are simply not capable of making that distinction. Anyone who would make such a claim already has their bias firmly entrenched, so the claim is not a statement of fact, but rather of personal preference. In fact, ALL computers WITHIN THE SAME DEVICE CLASS are exactly the same level of difficulty.
The MIT mainframe was/is far more difficult to use than your FreeBSD box, or my various Linux servers, which are all more difficult to use than a consumer-level GUI box running Ubuntu Hardy or OSX or Windows 7, but the simple truth is that any modern, current operating system married to any modern, current set of hardware and configured properly for use by a consumer-level user is exactly as easy to use and as reliable and trustworthy as any other. Nobody needs to worry about AV or hardware drivers or compiling software. They are ALL equal with the two exceptions noted, below.
The only differences are: Price for the gear and the appearance of some sort of social status boost.
Any reasonable evaluation of the gear would make this perfectly obvious, but there’s no money in such an evaluation … the only “good” comment is one that comes down on the Mac or Winbox (or ?) side, because those are the comments that make money. Not the comments that tell the truth. Is your Ford easier to drive than my Toyota? Not likely. Neither is your Mac easier to use than that other person’s Win7 box. That’s the simple and obvious truth.
But BMW is easier to drive than Toyota, ford and even Porche! Also I don’t know why are you even putting ford here, they are not serious maker, they are junk!
PC will not die because it is the right sized device for the human being. In other devices, some component, screen, input like keyboard, mouse, are not in the right place or at right angles for the human being to enjoy. Even laptop cannot replace PC.
PC also represents freedom, you have control on power supply (you dont have irreplaceable batteries), components like graphics cards, monitor, casing etc, etc. Mobility is not everything.
As long as PC is there Windows will be there. It will be only replaced when someone comes up with a software that does the functions of Windows better than Windows.
This article is spot on.
I’m going out on a limb and predicting Twitter integration will be so important that Apple will either duplicate it or buy Twitter outright before the end of this year. I give it a 10% chance of happening.
It may be so important because Apple is trying to catch up with Android and WP7 (which has social – not only Twitter – built in the architecture). So I feel a bit let down by Apple here, how come they didn’t think about this off the bat and are only propping it up now?
Catch up with WP7? I went to the ballpark the other night, and sitting around me I counted no less that 20 people using iphones. The iphone is everywhere. Guess what? When the deal with ATT & Tmobile closes a ton more will iphones will be sold. Than means 3 of the 4 U.S. carriers will be selling them. I’ve never seen a WP7 phone much less anyone using one. The article is correct, it’s now the Android v iOS war now.
Theres a deal with AT&T and TMobile?
Oh you mean the one that will never leave the starting blocks.
https://www.tmonews.com/2011/05/opposition-to-attt-mobile-deal-grows/
One thing that definitely corroborates this simple fact was a bit of text not even highlighted on big Steve’s Lion keynote.
The words read “Windows Migration Assistant”.
Lion now effectively promotes PC-Mac migration with a specific tool, which I’m told works over wifi, lan and USB/Firewire. Like the Mac Migration assistant but capable of working with Vista/Win 7 machines. There was no mention of XP in the dev community discussions that followed.
Once PC users have migrated over to Lion then effectively the push to the cloud can occur just as Bob has predicted. Marginalising Microsoft further. This all said, Microsoft has a place in my heart and unlike Google, Apple and Microsoft intentions seem more clear cut. Pay at the pass and then use, not free at the pass and then data mining/ad serving. I personally feel very uncomfortable with the direction that Google constantly takes and fear that it could be the undoing of the company.
I feel you’ve completely missed the point of the column. Jobs isn’t killing Windows PCs, he’s killing the desktop computer, including both Windows PCs AND Macs.
The desktop PC is about as dead as it’s going to be for the next 10 years, which is actually: NOT DEAD.
I still need my multiple screens to jump between current market conditions, different news sources and collaborative efforts. Many other individuals don’t multitask so crazily but are focused on much more data than fits onto a 4″ or 10″ screen.
What HAS NOW DIED is the era where new development efforts will be primarily PC-targeted. People have their desktops and won’t give them up for years; what they don’t have, and will spend cash for, are ways to get more in touch with their traveling team mates, with their friends and family, with views into the virtual world.
That’s what RIP PC’s means.
WMA has been around since OS/X 10.3 for sure, maybe even 10.2.
I thought the same thing when I heard Jobs money line comment. In addition I appreciated the graph that was displayed by Apple. It showed around 70% of Chinese iOS users do not own a computer.
How did they activate? What do they sync with?
Not counting iOS5, which isn’t released yet, you still need a PC to activate, sync, and update an iPad or iPhone.
Wait- I can sit in the middle of a park with 3G reception and get any song or app that I want. If I have wifi I can get movies and other big stuff too. If that’s all I care about, why would I need a PC?
@Michael, those were households without their own PC. If they have a phone they activate at the store or from their work.
It’s interesting that Chinese iOS users don’t need to plug their iDevice into a computer running iTunes. Guess they’re way ahead of the rest of us.
An iOS 4 device needs to be plugged in to a computer exactly twice — once to get it activated, and the second time to upgrade to iOS 5 at which point it never needs to be plugged in again. The first time can happen at your local Apple Store or neighbors house, as can the second…
The apple “cloud” is basically a courier for your data. Apple’s cloud acts as a seamless server to move your data from one device and deliver it to all your other devices quickly and automatically ( if you choose to leave the free feature turned on ). The data is actually stored on your devices still and requires less user manipulation to allow you to work seamlessly or enjoy your content across all your devices. For example : Take a picture on your iphone and it is sent to your ipad within seconds. The apple cloud doesn’t own your data, it just moves it for you to your other devices automatically . All wirelessly and not requiring hardware purchases or setting up your home PC as a server. Watch the entire keynote presentation people !!! then make comments !!! It appears that many are reading headlines or some of the very poorly drafted articles and blogs based on opinions rather than facts. Apple is about making your life simpler, not about data mining and selling your information. If you watch the keynote you will be better informed.
Jake,
Being aware of how icloud actually works, I sort of feel that its deceiving. To me the “cloud” means that I am storing my data in a data center someplace that is taking care of redundancy and only providing my with a centralized location for my stuff. I agree that its good Apple is not “data mining” and just transferring your data between devices.
“70% of Chinese iOS users do not own a computer”
hmm, I take it from that statemetn that a device with a CPU, GPU, RAM, persistent storage, network/comm, an OS, purchasable applications, with local data application storage is _NOT_ a computer.
my iOS device is a computer.
It’s not a _PC_. but then again, maybe it is… the uber_personal_computer. It’s not a multi-user computer. It’s _your_personal_ computing device.
But that’s really saying that 70% of the chinese don’t need to manage the physical devices that contain the data and computational logic.
Some people need the metal. Most people do not. All they need is a glass interface to something someone else has figured out how to make work for the masses. The rest is just a headache that came with a Windows License.
I did not originate this, read or heard it somewhere: “No one is going to do a 1,000 share stock trade on their phone!”
Back in the early 70s people were already moving hundreds of thousands of dollars around with a phone call to their broker or to the Reserve Fund.
This I know, but analysis, doing the usual trades, no. I use my phone a lot for data, email and have some great ideas for some applications as adjuncts to what I do as desktop or actually moving those same desktop apps to the cloud. But having said all this, I think there is a reason people use big or dual monitors, local storage, multi-processors and non of those reasons have anything to do with “Cloud” computing.
It’s too early to make accurate predictions about what will happen to Windows. The enterprise is pretty much in love with Microsoft Windows because of all the loyal IT dudes with Microsoft certification. They’re not going to give that stuff up without a fight. I continue to hear that offices live and die by using Microsoft Office. MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint are pretty much the standard and nobody wants to give them up. I’m a Mac user and I really enjoy using Microsoft Office. However, I doubt if corporations are going to start trading their Windows PCs in for iMacs or Mac Minis. They’re going to stick with using their Dells and Acers and HPs until they’re no longer made and that will never happen. Apple isn’t putting any Windows PC vendors out of business no matter how cheap OSX becomes.
I’m fairly certain that Microsoft Windows will be around in the majority for a long, long time no matter what type of user simplicity Apple has to offer. Those Wintard users want computer that are difficult to use because it makes them look that much smarter than the average non-tech user. That’s why they always boast about how stupid Mac users are because Macs are too simple to use. A Wintard equates complexity with usability. A Wintard would say that if an OS or application is too simple to use then it must be almost useless. I’ve dealt with too many non-tech users that just want easy to use applications to match their abilities. They don’t seem to want to apply the extra effort to learn a complicated application. That’s where Apple comes to their rescue. A simplified interface is what they want and Apple delivers.
There will still be plenty of power users and consumers that get training to use Windows applications and Windows will still be very valuable. I expect Windows to lose some market share, but not a lot as long as the enterprise has its way. Apple will have a very difficult time killing Windows if it is possible at all.
I don’t give a darn about Apple’s cloud services. A decent NAS can do all that for all my devices with as much storage as I need.
Computers are inherently complex. It’s not all about the interface. It’s about the capabilities. Any cababilities that Steve feels are unneeded by his target market he just leaves out making things simpler. Microsoft has been trying to serve all markets, making their OS overly complex for many of us. Dedicated iDevices are a great idea for people who don’t want to mess with their tech, but general purpose PCs, Mac or not, add complexity with capability.
“I don’t give a darn about Apple’s cloud services. A decent NAS can do all that for all my devices with as much storage as I need.”
You are the exact opposite of Apple’s target group. Yes, technically smart competent people can do all of this, just like my Dad’s generation all know how to re-assemble a carburetor. “Computing”, or whatever you want to call it, is moving to an era where ordinary people don’t have to think about how it works and don’t want to.
This has been the wave Apple has been riding for the past ten years. We have two fifteen year old girls in our house. This point has been hammered home time and again as we’ve watched them grow up. The iCloud just relieved me of duties such as making sure they back-up their photos and music… I won’t miss that at all.
The author obviously has never heard of Windows Live Mesh… Microsoft has been doing what iCloud does for 8 months now.
Valid point that Windows Live Mesh has “been around” for a while, but being around and being useful are two different things. It is fair to argue that what Apple is attempting here may not be successful – that it is too early to tell, but does anybody really think Windows LIve Mesh is at all good?
Everyone I know who’s used it, including myself, have enjoyed it. Setup a watch list of folders, and it’ll sync all of them across devices — cloud included. With Windows 8 coming out, expect it to be native, enhanced web interface, more storage, etc.
My point was that it’s ridiculous to say that iCloud will “kill Windows”, when Microsoft were the first ones to do what iCloud does, and will continue developing Mesh in future OS releases.
— MS has to become the next IBM
IBM does what it does because it owns, literally, the mainframe arena. They don’t do so well away from that. Even AIX, which I adore, has been slipped off to a shallow grave. M$’s analogue, from times past, is the previously mentioned Wang, which built its castle on word processing (office automation, generally). Come down to it, and Office is the Holy Grail of M$, not the OS, which is barely developed. It’s only purpose is to house, however badly, Office. For this you can thank Mitch Kapor.
Yeah right!
http://mikefourie.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/windows-live-mesh-2011-review/
The desktop is headed the way of the Dodo….maybe the laptop as well….but I doubt everyone is going to give up physical control of their personal data storage. How many businesses, or wealthy individuals, are going to entrust some leviathan third party, multi-national with all their sensitive data? Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are pretty tough customers, but someone like Putin is in an entirely different class. Think either Bill or Steve could resist Pooty-Poot?
Mass storage devices(something different than a server) that stays in your home or place of business…..probably in a fireproof safe……and is accessed by mobile devices seems like the future.
100 years back our grandparents didn’t trusted banks too, (they were right)
this time we’re wrong, cloud storage is the future (new) encryption technology will solve putins concerns
— encryption technology will solve putins concerns
when you have the keys, you don’t need to break to enter.
the same applies for your online banking or any service that u use with a key, maybe our banks should save our keys instead of our money or we’ll have in the future some R/F Chip implemented in our body with the key inside that stops working when our heart beat stops too, we die our data dies end of the story 😉
Apple didn’t sacrifice the Mac, they just repositioned it.
But I agree that this will kill Windows because Windows stands alone, unlike the Mac, which sits comfortably among iOS devices.
The real target in demoting the PC was Google: by making the cloud about nothing other than what it’s good for, Apple puts the spotlight on Google and catches it with its pants down. Google wants to BE the cloud, without reason or purpose.
Just like Microsoft wanted to be THE OS, without reason or purpose. “Windows Everywhere”, right? But Microsoft never said WHY they wanted it everywhere, or what good that would bring to users.
Apple shows, Google tells. Or rather doesn’t tell, for the same reason Microsoft never did. “Google Everywhere”. But WHY?
What good does that bring to users? Ads?
iCloud doesn’t have ads, and Steve didn’t fail to mention that.
Thin clients make sense from both an economic and technology standpoint. The downside to hardware manufacturers is that we won’t need a new goody every 12 months. There are challenges however … the data/content providers will need to retool to support the increasing number of clients and formats that are evolving. This assumes Apple will let them in. Should be another interesting year!
Looks like It’s not the product but the marketing which matters..Microsoft has been offering 25GB free since ages..nobody notices that..it seems like change at the top is the only way MS can show it’s real power & capabilities. Jobs sneezes and everybody notices but what about the other Steve?
Apple has been polishing what Microsoft began with. Mac vs Windows. iPhone vs Win mobile. iPad vs windows tablets..Safari vs IE etc. seriously what Apple has invented?? It’s all originated from Microsoft
What? The Mac is derivative from Windows? I think you better check your chronology. While Apple launched the Macintosh, MS was still pushing MS-DOS. Of course, let’s not forget how Microsoft sandbagged IBM with OS2.
Keep in mind that Netscape was long the dominant browser before Microsoft essentially bought IE from Spyglass.
I’m not a an unalloyed Apple fan. However, let’s be realistic. Microsoft wasn’t exactly at the vanguard with virtually any of their products.
No the mac was a cheap knockoff of the Xerox PARC Alto, developed in ’73
https://www.digibarn.com/collections/books/xerox-parc-1970-80/alto-article/
The iPad and iCloud are a cheap knockoff of PARC’s ubiquitous computing work in ’90:
http://sandbox.xerox.com/want/papers/ubi-sciam-sep91.pdf
Steve Jobs does steal from the best.
Cheap knockoff? You have no idea what you’re talking about. None.
Apple’s special sauce is control of the entire stack – the cake has been baked – this is just the icing.
How is Apple going to pry Excel from cookware America?
iCloud is aimed at consumers and not at all suitable for enterprise. I expect Mac OS X Server to be the next shoe to drop as the enterprise version of iCloud. Your Thunderbolt on a Mini argument may be very close to correct.
[…] iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows […]
Apple iPhone and iPad have been successful because of it had technology to differentiate them like the capacitive touchscreen and multitouch, but its cloud venture will not be successful. Cloud is now corporate tool. For the cloud to be successful with individuals, the average bandwidth usage must increase many times. I do not think people want a less powerful system with all the storage on the Net. If the cloud is to be acceptable, it should leverage the power of the desktop system plus use the advantage of networked storage.
If people remember 1984 when Apple and Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh Computer, the focus was always on documents (i.e. data). Applications were always there to create documents.
Apple was and is always document-centric, while Microsoft was and still is application-centric.
This document-centric approach enabled Apple and Steve Jobs, along with colleagues, to advance that vision through iCloud.
The cloud experience, now matter who is in control, must be seamless, quick, painless and fast – for everybody. What Apple, Google or anybody needs to do now is ensure that service is so invisible and unthinking, making it a part of everyday life. Personal storage devices will be something eldritch that greybeards use, carrying sticks, thumbs, shiny discs, etcetera and poring jealously over the content, mistrustful of uploading anything to what will a large service center, only because of fear of day when the big glitch will occur and whole galaxies of data will be wiped, unobtainable or altered horribly.
You rock Kevin! when does the movie come out?
Cringely is suffering from the same “Mobile” tunnel vision that afflicts so many other media geeks. The assumption that all computing will be “mobile” is nonsense because so many organisations and individuals have no mobile requirements. “Mobile” is primarily about keeping the chimpanzee in the street from being bored.
Where real mobile requirements exist, “The Cloud”, which when spelt out in full means “signing over your data to a for profit organisation that you know far to little about”, might be useful, but the owner of the data should always keep the primary copy.
My data lives in a small cupboard on 10T bytes of network storage connected to my router and accessible from any computer in the place. I can conceive of synchronising a subset of this with some global storage service, but I would always keep the primary copy. The problem of “getting it back out” referred to by Cringely would not exist, but I’d take a lot of convincing that the distributed copy would be secure. Is there any evidence that any large organisation, commercial or otherwise, can keep data secure?
And am I going to process any of my data with “cheap downloaded apps” of unknow quality? I think not.
Here’s my two cents
“It just works” will trump “I want control” for the technically unsavy.
The opposite of the above statement will keep Windows viable for a very long time.
I fail to recognise how the introduction of an idea that has been common since the inception of the network means the impending demise of microsoft, and therefore, windows.
My primary reason for failing to recognise this is because the only hardware on which you can run osx, is apples. You cant even run snow leapord on a g5, it has to be an intel mac.
Therefore, unless you are suggesting that everyone that has a pc is going to find a way to hackintosh their machines to run osx, or install linux, or that apple’s hardware share is going to take a jump from paltry to totalitarian, then id like to posit the notion that frankly, you dont know what you are talking about.
Sorry, but this not making any sense. At least, not in the next 5 or 10 years. Internet connections might get faster and faster, but a large movie/music/image/whatever collection in the cloud? Not any time soon. I don’t think the need for private storage will go away in the next years.
What Apple are doing is to make the hard disk drive obsolete*.
* (for consumers — obviously not for data centres).
This article is spot on!!!
I also believe that the article has started to show that Apple is now becoming the next “Big Blue” that they were fighting not to long ago.
I also believe in data privacy and the ownership of my data, further more the creative rights to all the data I create!
I also think that SONY is the perfect example as to why the cloud should not be trusted from the point of view of data safety, as there are to many security gaps in the system. Never mind the fact that another company owns your data because they have the “Super User” access to all your stuff. Also lets not forget Geolocation and companies being able to track your every move or facebook selling your “personality” for focused marketing again by companies!
I just do not think that any COMPANY on this planet should have that much power, control and say over our private and personal data!! This is the time when governments should behave responsibly and legislate against this, if only to protect our data, insn’t this their job to do so after all.
Wow, I really feal that I could go on for ever with this and I for one am really glad to see that my concerns are mirrored else where!
PS! I love Apple products, but I love privacy and data protection even more!!
Very catchy title, but I feel the argument is very weak.
Someone else perhaps have mentioned what I’m about to say in the comments above – alas, storing data & personalization on the web so that it is shareable across computers are not a new concept that Apple just invented. I agree that Apple probably will make iCloud more usable than Windows Live ever be – but the concept is the same.
In your mind probably you have Windows 98 in the back of your mind and iCloud would probably kill that. But Windows 7 + Live has been marketed as a cloud offering (Software+Services) since a year ago.
So, can I say that Windows 7+Live’s real purpose is to encourage Apple coming up with iCloud?
You’re wrong.
The purpose of iCloud is not to defeat microsoft.
It is to defeat the wireless carriers.
They now have nothing to offer except their bandwidth. Their portals, customisations, marketplaces and so on are totally obsolete.
I would hardly call 5 Gb “cloud” storage a revolutionary idea
People wonder why I refer to Microsoft HQ Campus in Redmond WA as ” Jurassic Park One”…
I think the time has come for devices to be nothing more than conduit for content. Apple may eliminate the need for a computer altogether. Like others, though, what happens when a cloud is served with a subpoena for ‘fill in the blank here for illegal content.’ I also can imagine, at some point civil liberties and 1st Amendment rights being included in some future debate. Nonetheless, the timing must be right.
This is all and good; however, what will this do for my data consumption rates which are being limited by AT&T? People complain about the price of fuel, but when I look at the big picture, I am making a car payment just for the ability to move bits from one location to another. This is going to be another hand in my wallet.
I don’t fear the cloud, I fear the network. When you add cable, land-line, cell-phone, data plan, DSL, and any caps (did I mention digital service for family members); the monthly fees are more than a new car payment.
A Short History of Apple’s iCloud
Apple’s first offering in the cloud was in January 2000. At that time it was called iTools. Improvements were made and the name was changed to .Mac two years later, and then to MobilMe in 2008. Now more improvements are made and the name changes once more, this time to iCloud.
Google Docs was launched in 2005. Salesforce (the product) was launched a few months after Apple’s iTools in 2000.
Google CEO was on Apple Board when Multi-Touch iPhone was being developed & delivered to the market WAY before Google went into the phone business so Android is copying Apple on that one. Also Apple Safari Browser Engine is the technology behind the Google Chrome Browser which is why iOS Safari browser is the leading mobile device browser with iPhone + Android phones using it.
Microsoft Live Mesh Azure Cloud Computing Platform is only 8 months old & hardly a leader in The Cloud & not a good marketing strategy for the public… iCloud is something the public will remember. Also AZURE means the color of a cloudless sky…GOOD ONE MICROSOFT!
*eyeroll* This is exactly what they said – in pretty much the same words – when the first NC slithered under the toilet stall door and onto the market. Cloud computing is the tulip investment of the 21st century. It’s one of those things where the pendulum swings periodically – we had timesharing on mainframes, then we had PCs, then we had the NC, then we had PCs again, now it’s “cloud computing”. Next swing, the PC will surge ahead as cheaper and higher-performance and more private and (insert whatever advantage you care to imagine here), and this cloud nonsense will be back in the trunk waiting for the next swing and a new name.
Yes, I fully understand that SaaS is a very attractive business model – charge someone per-month fees for something that’s impossible to pirate – but it is only attractive to the seller, not the (rational) buyer unless the online aspect of it actually adds value.
Fact of the matter is that important data is too important to trust to someone else’s business model. Some stuff – media, working copies of unimportant documents, etc – is fine in the cloud. It gets deleted, or the provider goes out of business, or an obscure legal challenge denies you access to it for whatever reason.
For anything else, a shoebox full of 8″ floppies under your bed is a safer storage bet.
I am reminded of storage vendor Iomega’s tag line from a few years ago: “Because it’s your stuff.”
The easiest was to kill Microsoft is to keep Ballmer as CEO. Things are already progressively falling apart in an accelerated fashion. No further effort is needed really.
While Apple and Google could make M$ irrelevant eventually, I think there’s a big obstacle at the present. (Maybe someone will graciously correct me on this.)
There are still a great number of folks using M$ file formats: for example, .doc, .docx, .xls, and so on. These are used especially by enterprise interests, and they have investments in those file formats – lots of OLD files stored in those formats, that would have to be converted to any sets of new formats, for example, lots of training for new software (including both users and help desk personnel). That’s big bucks and time-consuming.
I’ve tried with both Google Apps and with iWork, and have found it to be very difficult to convert any files that have complex structures or formatting to M$ formats with any fidelity. They certainly can’t be sent via email with that fidelity. This would be a great burden, and a very difficult transition.
Google Apps and iWork (one or both) need to honor legacy file formats, during a transition, in order to make M$ irrelevant.
The correction is this, as I see it, you could easily download for FREE Open Office it opens all the above mentioned files
The iCloud platform doesn’t actually store your data, it merely facilitates the syncing of that data between multiple devices. So, as you write, yes they have devalued the PC, removing the need to “sync” between a mobile device and the PC by being connected. However, our data will not be “lost to the cloud” as you say, it all remains local on all of our devices.
Rumors of the PC’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Note that by PC I don’t mean just Windows but the desktop/laptop.
There are still lots of things you can do (easily, at least) on a tablet. Tablets may have some simpler versions of software like image editing, movie editing, office productivity, programming, etc. but for those who want or need full-featured software like that, it doesn’t really matter what music you have in the cloud, it matters what interface you have on your computer.
Windows may very well shrink up and die, but that doesn’t alter the fact that, for the foreseeable future, the iOS platform and those similar are suited for media consumption, and desktops and laptops are suited for production.
I totally agree. And I’ll add – any shift from pc/laptops to tablet/”devices” is simply a shift from creation to consumption, which is overall not a good thing. People with computers used to create things, and some still do but that number is getting smaller and smaller. To turn great technology into simply a tool for consumption would be a crime, but it seems to be the path that Apple is pioneering.
Interesting comment about Microsoft still owning the enterprise market. More and more companies are exploring the idea of “bring your own device” and running Citrix etc… as away to be device agnostic. At my company we’ve already seen a big push to Apple hardware coming from employees that want to use their own machines due to comfort etc… Will be hard for MS to retain the desktop OS in this model.
Humm, I think most eveyone has missed the point of Cloud computing. I personally think we just don’t know what do to with it yet. Everyone knows the phone model, you buy an app from an online store. It is on your phone uses some service to do an activity, data is maybe stored locally or remotely. There are very few novel aps I have seen, that really make use of these various capabilities. A good example would be Shazam. I find this a great ittle app. Listen to a song as I drive up in the driveway, shoot who did that? Press the Shazam button, in a minute maybe I gete who did it, the name and of course a button to press that lets me buy it off Zune. Now if they were smart, they would use location and look up with Ticketmaster if the group was playing near me soon and find out if I would like to buy tickets.
Now in my case I have an app I wrote years ago, that I want to move to the cloud, why? Well hard to sell the app to the small audiance of Small Buisness it applies to for a price that makes it worth while. But those same companies also can justify a fee per month to use an online service. The side benefit is they do not have to manage things like an interactive data driven web site. Also their data is backed up automatically, and I have some ideas for mobile phone apps for their rout people.
MS has over the last few years spent Billions I’m sure building out the infastructure of their many Cloud initiatives. I think their Application Service Bus could be the most potentially useful service they have? Anyway they have a complete solution for developers to get work into the cloud, not sure anyone else has as complete a solution. Add to this the Millions of MS oriented programmers out there and the sky is litterally the limit. I think MS has planned for what happens after the desktop fades away and is ready.
Let me just say as I user, I appreciate the benefits of the cloud overall, but I won’t use the cloud for everything.
And no matter how fast or powerful tablets or smartphones get in the future, they will not replace a laptop for me (or my desktop). The simple reason is that I use tablets and smartphones almost exclusively for content consumption, not content creation. I do short e-mail responses on tablets or my smartphone. I send tweets and Facebook updates. Other than that, I’m reading on them.
Sure smartphones, tablets and even laptops are useful to me when I’m on the road, but when I am home I get work done on a desktop with a big 24″ monitor.
The tablets and smartphones of today won’t replace a pc, granted. But what about a umpc that can make phone calls? As umpc’s become more powerful (e.g. with Intel’s 3D chip) and with the added ability to make phone calls, we may be able to have one device for portable use and dock it to other peripherals for productivity use. While on the road, no need to waste valuable screen real estate on a keyboard if an easy to use slide out keyboard is available. This is what I use now: http://www.oqo.com (with a docking station at home). It fits in my shirt pocket and runs Windows 7 Ultimate. Unfortunately, it has no phone capability unless you count Skype. It’s also unfortunate the company went out of business two years ago. But it demonstrates what is possible if we refuse to pay for the cloud and multiple devices to go with it.
When Apple launched iTunes and iPod, it was a full end-to-end service, a complete vertical business. They created a great music player, a good tool to manage one’s music, a service to purchase music electronically, and they worked closely with the recording industry to secure their support. Until then others offered only single parts of the whole. There were players. There were music mgmt applications. There were folks selling some music. And the recording industry was on the defensive.
Yes Microsoft, and Amazon, and Google, and countless others have “clouds.” But again as history has taught us, this is just one piece of an overall “service.” I suspect Apple has a full end-to-end service in mind to support more vertical businesses.
Microsoft is in trouble. The problem is deeper than Apple’s low upgrade price for Mac OSX, or the fact Apple has a cloud, or that Apple will be storing our data for us. Microsoft is in trouble because they don’t have the vision to create an end-to-end service and vertical business. They have all the technology and resources to do so — but they don’t.
Many years ago I used to observe Microsoft monopolistic practices. It put a lot of firms out of business. During that time I observed many of Microsoft’s competitors making really dumb business decisions and were putting themselves out of business too.
Today, I fear Microsoft is now putting itself out of business by making dumb business decisions. Microsoft may be worried about what Apple is doing. Their bigger problem is in what they are NOT doing.
Microsoft know where the money is and it is in the living room – Xbox, Kinect and Augmented Reality.
If office is so profitable why do the other companies not copy it?
Microsoft will simply mimic Apple or Google’s idea and dominate… if you don’t believe they can dominate look at Windows (owned Apple, Amiga, BeOS) and Xbox (owned Sony, Nintendo) etc.
Microsoft don’t have to be original because I am sure in the past it has caused them to bleed money.
Trust me Augmented Reality is the future and Microsoft will have there fingers in it even if they become the next IBM.
You don’t become — or maintain — a company the size of Microsoft on the back of a single consumer technology like the Xbox. Sure, that’s cool stuff, but it makes Microsoft very little money (it’s debatable as to whether or not Xbox has even made them dollar one over its lifetime, even).
Office and Windows are cash cows. Switching off of them is pretty painful for consumers and businesses alike, and I’m speaking as someone who has done that migration twice now: Windows to Linux, then back to Windows, then to the Mac. There is “good enough” software on all of these platforms but you have to find it and convert your data and just plain learn the new software.
It’s no surprise that businesses have no intention of moving any time soon, they have huge investments, although with virtualization and a migration of applications to the web I bet many PCs are really being used more like thin clients and could readily be replaced with stuff that is simpler and more reliable. Still, that’s a conversion that’s going to take six years minimum and probably nine (ie two to three obsolescence cycles) in the business world.
In the consumer world? I bet the next five years will be totally transformative. Little of what consumers traditionally buy PCs for really needs a PC these days, most people spend virtually all of their time on the web, and you just do not need a full-blown Windows PC for that. Moreover, stuff like the iPad has way fewer maintenance headaches.
Replacing Office is not easy. You ask “why hasn’t anyone done it?” They have tried, repeatedly. I have tried using many of these alternatives — especially the Open Source stuff. There are a lot of things I do not like about MS Word, but let me tell you from first hand experience: Everyone else is much, much worse. Open Office is the closest I’ve seen in a long, long time and it has a whole lot of usability and performance problems and the output quality is not up to my standards.
Having said that, I think we’re going to see more and more cloud services like Google Apps. Now, the only one of their apps I really use regularly is the spreadsheet but it is being used for all kinds of things I used to use Excel for. It’s really nice to be able to edit them anywhere I happen to be, and to share them to anyone on the web easily. It’s not great for power use for sure, but most of us only use the simplest features — and it works fine for those.
Business is about collaboration and cloud apps make that easier than ever. If there is a threat to Office, then, it’s those kinds of apps, but I expect it will be a rather gradual conversion particularly in light of security considerations.
Yeah I guess I was a bit hasty with Office…
http://money.msn.com/market-news/post.aspx?post=0eb911e6-0437-43e5-be9b-c439ad234fae
[…] like crazy for our data because once they have it we’ll be their customers forever.”— Robert X. CringelyTweetPreviously: Quote of the Day: LessienAll Postsby BEN BROOKS Archive Contact Colophon Projects […]
You failed to compare the Microsoft cloud offerings and sync services that already exist for free such as office live and live mesh, windows live etc…a minimum of fact checking please!
You are right about MS offerings already in the cloud but they haven’t taken off in quite the way I have experienced with modern cloud services like dropbox. I think the reason is because the MS (and other corporate services) are not as seamless as the new generation of cloud offerings. It is early days and MS could do something dramatic that would surprise us all but in my estimation, like RIM, they are too tied to the corporate market to do this.
Yup, MS has “cloud” – but where’s the integration with WP7 *and* Windows on the level that Apple just announced?
At first, that gap seems small and trivial – but it’s not. That gap is why Apple is kicking butt and so many others are scratching their head trying to figure out what is propelling Apple.
What? This article (and Jobs) is crazy.
I already put all my data onto my raid NAS downstairs in the basement, and I walk copies around on my microSDHC in my blackberry. If I ever cared to, I could use some easyDNS to set up a free domain name back to that NAS and access anything there I wanted from anywhere in the world. Cloud? No.
I’ve got nothing on Apple’s cloud, and after a few more PS3 disasters neither will anybody else have anything (important) on any other corporation’s cloud.
Grunchy,
That sounds like a sweet setup.
The point is that you are more capable than 99.9% of the population. For all the people out there who glaze over when reading acronyms like NAS, RAID, and microSDWHATEVER, iCloud is going to be the simplest, most painless way to achieve what you’re doing on your own.
Like it or not, Apple makes it easy for people to do fairly technical tasks with no technical knowledge. They also make it easy for those of us WITH technical knowledge who are tired of managing and moving our digital assets from place to place, setting up easyDNS services, etc.
If I had to bet, I’d say that iCloud is going to be east, simple, invisible and it’s going to be a huge success
I’m still recovering from the shock of seeing a google alert for “easydns” in Cringley’s column….thought he like, actually mentioned our name or something….but anyway…
I think Grunchy’s point in away compliments Cringely’s, the latter who is saying “the network is the device”, but at the end of the day, what do you do with devices, you “use” them. That device “use” is heavily underpinned by naming and discovery.
The discrete parts are becoming less important, what is emerging is the ubiquity and interoperation of all those parts.
I am still surprised we haven’t seen a TLD application out of Apple for .mac, as overlaying all of this with a namespace and associated services seems to be a logical extension (although the TLD itself is less relevant than the services themselves)
It’s called SkyDrive – full integration with Windows and WP7
Microsoft has to balance feeding the cash cow (Office + OS) and sacrificing the cash cow (Ad supported Google Docs and a cheaper OS). Microsoft has Azure but how hard can you push without risking sales or Windows Server 2008? Google and Apple have the advantage since they don’t have the Office + OS cash cow.
I don’t see Microsoft ever able to sell a 3G netbook for 30 bucks a month. If they do, then they can become relevant again.
That’s $720 every two years, rather expensive unless it includes unlimited data service as well. Never did understand why anyone would choose to pay forever for a piece of hardware that doesn’t include some sort of valuable, needed, and continuing service.
The future is the Ecosystem – a unified set of services, tools, and hardware that let people do everything they want consistently, conveniently, and without interruption. Apple pioneered it, Google has moved towards it, and Amazon is clearly going to create one of their own. There are also smaller ecosystems, such as the ones in gaming consoles.
Microsoft isn’t ready for this. They don’t “do” service, they sell software and OSes. People have, after many years, gotten used to convenience and functionality, and every annoying upgrade, every virus, every bug, every lost file makes them more inclined to go where the convenience is.
Thats the Ecosystem.
I agree on the points that at some level people are going to get locked in (psychologically or otherwise) to some Ecosystems. That’s when things get interesting – and you end up, oddly, with the old closed-system battles as history repeats itself.
– Steve
Interested in hosting your own “cloud” from home? Don’t allow big corporations to store and own your intellectual data! I just released a beta of my new software called Nest which aims to do that!
Help me out by testing it:
http://glassocean.net/nest
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/hu2xy/interested_in_hosting_your_own_music_cloud_from/
Perry… no thanks.
I already paid $100 for a DNS-323 and it does everything your program can do and I don’t even know what nest is.
The problem’s already solved by NAS and free DNS services, in fact I think this whole “cloud” idea is just exaggerated hype. Same like 3D video, eventually when the hype dies down it’ll blow away too.
Grunchy – Besides the fact that 99.999% of consumers cannot set up their own NAS, DNS, etc., there is also the convenience of backup – I would assume that a premium service will have good, offsite backups – does your NAS? I think also that a cloud service will be more reliable. That NAS sitting in your cellar is susceptible to outages stemming from a backhoe in your backyard to anywhere along the path to your ISP, including the ISP itself. Not to mention power outages. Security is a toss-up: more people will be trying to hack iCloud than your home service, but the security on the cloud will probably be more professional.
The advantage of the NAS is that it’s useful when there is no internet since it contains all your stuff.
Your stuff where? In your basement? Are you forever going to live in your basement? Without the Internet, what use is your data? Are you going to make your own movies or music or news? The cloud is here to stay – its already Facebook, Twitter, E-mail, YouTube, Dropbox – all that Apples iCloud does is take what exists and make it user-friendly.
Grunchy, interesting product, looks like a lightweight Linux FTP server. Nest is a little different; it will install on a Windows computer (usually at home) and serve up your media library through a web browser, among some other things like being able to open documents and images inside the browser (when your device doesn’t have a native browser handler for that file extension), and send input (keyboard/mouse) to the computer. I would encourage you to check out some of the features I’ve listed on the Nest page. The free Nest beta is mostly about the music streamer and iPhone support, but there are some extensive plans that will extend beyond simple FTP capability.
Actually it’s quite simple to buy and own a NAS todays. Thus having Your personal cloud and not having to depend on some corporate security (there isn’t any, really). And even dedicated applications for Your pocket devices are available.
i.e. Synology’s DiskStation http://j.mp/gKh8nc
From the link you provided:
“Novice and home users, however, might be intimidated by its setup software and the number of features it has to offer.”
and $860 as an entry price is a little steep for most users
Synology Diskstation starts at $300 + any drives you like to add:
https://www.amazon.com/Synology-America-DiskStation-Attached-DS411slim/dp/B004L87XAC
Its not expensive. The expensive (or inconvenient) part is the backup of the NAS itself to the Internet or to an external drive.
This is the funniest tech piece I have seen in quite a while. Whats even funnier is you buy into Job’s value proposition that the cloud has way more value than the luke warm adoption it is demonstrating. The topper is the hilarity point of him thinking his gadgets are going to remove relevance from the conventional computing infrastructure.
So you’re saying I am going to pay you to store and make accessible the content I already own and can access quite nicely, today? You guys really need to step away from the cool-aid, quickly, really!
Ric’s not the target market for this, as he sounds technically far more sophisticated than the average individual, but he is in the minority. Most people don’t understand how any of their phones, computers, etc work. So when someone like Steve Jobs says that they don’t have to learn anything because it is all built in and automatic, the adoption curve among the mainstream will be exponential.
“So when someone like Steve Jobs says that they don’t have to learn anything because it is all built in and automatic, the adoption curve among the mainstream will be exponential.”
Yup!
One small nit though – Steve isn’t just saying it, he’s *delivering* it (or will be).
Regarding the removal of relevance of the existing consumer infrastructure, I’m very much of the opinion that Windows has been bad for it. If you are experienced in IT technologies like I am, you’re probably called on regularly to fix PCs that are “slow” or “broken” or “doing this weird thing”, almost all of which come down to malware.
Consumers don’t want to deal with that, or with back-ups (IMO Apple’s Time Machine shows you how back-ups ought to be done, especially for consumers — I wish Microsoft would do that, Acronis True Image is pretty nice but nothing like as lightweight as Time Machine so my backups are always days out of date).
Recently I drowned my iPhone in an unfortunate washing machine accident. This is the kind of thing that happens pretty frequently according to the Apple Store guy. Now, I’ve killed phones before and it was always a hassle getting a new one and getting all the data on it. I had subscribed to Mobile Me so my wife could track my phone when I was on trips, and as a side-effect I got cloud back-up of the calendar and contacts. I replaced the phone with a shiney new one, told it my Mobile Me information, and before I even got the receipt for the phone I had the basics back on it.
The first time that happens people become Apple fans for life. Apple does that kind of thing better than *anyone*. Take, for instance, a new machine upgrade. Every new Windows machine I get (pretty much every two years) I get to spend a few days getting all the data on it and apps installed and preferences set up the way I want and drivers for all my hardware installed. It’s really irritating. I bought a Mac laptop years ago because they were extremely well built, and five years later bought a new one to replace it. Boot up the new one and it asks you to connect it to the old one. It then copies your entire set-up — drivers, applications, user data, user preferences — over to the new one. The first time it took 22 minutes, completely unattended, at the end of which I had a much faster version of the old one. It even copied over and ran PPC drivers for e.g. my scanner despite the fact it was an Intel machine. I was dumbfounded.
I can’t even begin to tell you how angry that made me at Microsoft. That is what the new machine experience *should* be like. Microsoft’s migration tools, in comparison, just plain suck. (I know that this is mostly the fault of the registry, but it is within their power to make the registry suck a lot less.) The experience was so good that I moved wholesale to Apple equipment not long after.
This is before we even talk about Time Machine, which is back-ups the way they ought to be done. I have an expensive back-up system for my Windows PCs but it’s pretty painful to run back-ups more than about once a day, it just hammers the machine. Time Machine is so lightweight that it runs every few minutes and I almost never even notice. My daughter’s machine blew a hard drive. We got a recplacement, booted it, it recognized the TM drive and asked if I wanted to restore. I did, and less than half an hour later she was right back where she was — right down to the last movie edit she had made.
People complain about how expensive Apple stuff is, and having just put out for a new Mac Pro I totally feel the pain. But I tell you: When you want to use the machine to do something, rather than spend time just keeping it running, Apple is the way to go. Moreover, I’m seeing minimum machine lifespans of 5 years and often 6 or 7 years, whereas 2 is about the limit for Windows machines for me. The Apple stuff costs more, sometimes a lot more, but I’m getting so much longer life out of it that the cost pretty much becomes a wash.
Customers have seen that with the iPod, and let me tell you if you get an iPad you’ll see it in spades. I am not really a fan of Jobs, but the technologies are head and shoulders above the competition when it comes to just doing what you want them to do. What’s more, Microsoft in particular has shown no propensity at all for changing how difficult it is to keep their stuff running or to maintain your work environment across hardware migrations. People have started to notice that and it shows in Apple’s stock price.
[…] Well, frankly, unless you are a committed Apple fanboi, there is little reason why you should be excited about iCloud. There are better options out there and Apple’s iCloud is more about lock-in to their devices and services than it is about enabling the consumer. Cringely even thinks it is Apple’s bid to bury Windows once and for all. […]
[…] signed up in this window between Apple’s announcement and when its service goes live. Both Google and Apple will soon be battling for the right to store users’ data, a much different fight than that going on between operating systems. Any advantage in that coming […]
“Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.”
You’re kidding, right? Last time I come to this blog.
[…] Update 6/8Cringely agrees with me about Microsoft’s continuing descent into irrelevance: iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows […]
appale is not the innovator here. it the last in the league. ms has mesh and sky drive. and goole has been working on the cloud since forever with google docs and gmail and almost everything.infact android and chrome are the onoy non cloud based things they have and even they are dependant on the net very heavely.
Interesting all the emotion this topic has generated, with outrage at losing possession of the physical storage medium. The point of these major market shifts is they address the majority of ordinary users’ needs. The idea that “my data’s safe because I can hold the laptop/backup drive/flash in my hand” is an illusion.
With ubiquitous internet connectivity, our files are already one misstep from exposure, and the device itself subject to fire, theft, failure, dropped on floor, accidental deletion, etc.
Since when where you not able to access google’s cloud from Android or Chrome? I’ll put everything into the apple cloud when apple opens it up so I can access it from any device. Right now gmail allows me access from almost anywhere – even then our company runs their own servers.
I’ll consider migraing only if they have done better with security than dropbox and all the rest. Cloud is the new buzzword but I think you’ll find most users will say to apple iDontCare.
@David L.,
Thanks for bringing sanity into this debate. I don’t know where folks get this idea that Jobs is obsessed with enslaving humanity. iCloud is a simple service. It doesn’t take away customer’s freedom, or deprive him of his files. All it does is it makes the documents, data, and music seamlessly accessible from other registered devices. For free! It’s not cloud computing, it’s cloud storage without the active management required from the customer. If you want all of your devices to have access to all of your stuff from anywhere you’ll love it. And, again, it’s free. What’s not to like? Even so, nobody is forcing anyone to take advantage of it.
I can’t understand how anyone could have a problem with a service they are not forced to use.
This is the only part that I think makes the article very confusing:
“Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer.”
No, with iCloud, the network is not the computer. Neither is data the computer. If data were the computer, it would not make difference whether you have an Android device, a Windows desktop, or WebOS tablet. The only change that iOS 5 and Lion announcement is like Jobs said, mobile devices have achieved the same status as notebook and desktop computers with regards to accessibility to data. That’s it! It’s really not that big of a deal as it’s not a new paradigm in computing. It’s a new paradigm, however, in convenience.
The biggest deal, in my opinion, is the agreements with labels so that users don’t have to upload everything to iCloud in order to then access it from multiple devices remotely. It saves customers bandwidth having to upload all their stuff, and it saves Apple from having to store it all. That was brilliant.
“Since when where you not able to access google’s cloud from Android or Chrome?”
I don’t think anyone said that. What Apple is offering is ubiquity. iCloud is free, API’s are provided for all programmers.
No longer do programmers have to choose – “Which do I pick, iDisk, DropBox, SugarSnyc, roll my own…????” They can start with iCloud and then pick up any or all of the others if they want to.
But they key is they are crazy to not start with iCloud.
Remember “it just works” – bang! That doesn’t happen by accident. This is the foundation to “my data anywhere”. I already have it with Mobile.Me today and it’s wonderful. This is building out and expanding on what is already one of the most valuable features of iOS I have today.
“I’ll put everything into the apple cloud when apple opens it up so I can access it from any device.”
sigh… you can – Mac, Windows or iOS. I’m sure some enterprising person will offer Android or whatever other OS support. Or you can continue to use DrobBox or other solutions that you might be using today.
Double sigh – I’m always amazed that Apple seems to be the only company people complain about when they offer *more* choice than they had before :p
Unless iCloud makes a provision for Android as well, it will be severely limiting itself. Android will be the dominant non-Apple platform going forward on many different devices. You don’t want to leave out that significant market share.
Why? How does Apple benefit from giving 5GB of free storage to Android customers?
Android has only been successful at subsidized phones, and even that is starting to plateau. There is absolutely no indication that Android will be a dominant platform. In fact, Google is hedging its bet with Chrome OS. Google will still be a major player in the next few years, but Android will be a cheap phone OS for OEMs.
Wow- deep analysis. NOT.
There isn’t a single real consumer out there who is going to put anything of importance only in the cloud.
And Apple is only giving you 5GB to put your stuff in – that’ll last about two weeks. Then as soon as they get asked to pay the whole experiment will come crashing down.
And Microsoft gives you RIGHT NOW (and has for over a year) 25GB of the same AND MORE functionality for free.
If this ‘analysis’ is an example of the creative freedom that Apple and Google are bringing to the world with their approach all I can say is iSheep and gSheep are looking more and more like a reality than an idea.
Are your emails important to you? Where do you store them? Granted, you may delete, but don’t you think the providers keep backup copies?
Do you have credit cards in Amazon, eBay, etc.?
How about your pictures, even the more intimate ones? A lot of people like Anthony Weiner obviously think the cloud is safe enough for them.
How about salesforce.com for customer-sensitive data?
Like it or not, data in the cloud is clearly the trend. You have to live under the rock to not see that.
Had a keyboard malfunction ( a spilled glass of wine and a bit of insomnia) late last night so used the iPAD to go to Apple to check out new keyboard options. Well, whole home page covered with QuickTime movie link about iCloud, iOS 5 & Lion. I thought I would quickly put myself to sleep watching the presentation but ended up watching most of it. . The whole thing was about an hour and one half long, covering the top ten features of each product.. Presentations were fairly compelling with respect to useful new features and will be extraordinarily useful fot the vast majority of users.
With respect to the 5 gig storage limitation- this does not apply to your iTunes music, iPhotos, imovies, imail or other Apple related content. Should be just fine for vast majority of users.
“adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome”
Um, have you used either of those recently. They’ve already had that for a long time now. I can buy a new Android phone and instantly have all my contacts, email, settings, and apps automatically pushed to the device. Music may not be pushed, but it’s there immediately too, and my photos. I can just check a box to have them stored locally too.
Chrome bookmarks and settings are automatically backed up and synced between however many places you run Chrome, etc, etc.
Maybe research some things before you comment on them. 😀
Until the capability to encrypt my data before it hits the cloud becomes ubiquitous so that I have total control over access to it I won’t be putting huge amounts of information there.
good point
Jim,
So don’t put your sensitive data there. No one has total control over anything.
But it’s nice to know if you choose to make available something you did on your Mac and then need to access it from your iPad while you are out of town, that it’s available.
Before, you’d have to use third-party services to do this. Now it’s available from within your apps.
To make it happen:
– source code should be open;
– data should be encrypted before leaving my device;
– and to make sure no-one can steal anyones data make all cloud contents also publicly available.
Posted previouly regarding long video from developer conference covering “top 10 most useful features” for iCloud, Lion & iOS 5.
I recall that automatic instant encryption is a feature for all new loud devices. (Technical details not covered in presentation.)
Would highly recommend viewing the presentation in it’s entirety for interested commenters.
“loud” should read “cloud”.
I’ve been saying for years now, and I’m pretty sure Bob has also mentioned that the problem with Microsloth is managment. To survive and thrive Microsoft needs a nerd at the helm, not a businessman. Gates filled this role in the early days, but with Ballmer running things there is no vision to direct the company through the tech rapids.
Sadly, any nerd smart enough to fit the, ah, “Bill” is likely too smart to want the job. I personally would be horrified at the prospect of migrating Microsoft to the company it needs to be to become a real player a few years down the road.
Bill is at the helm look at the acquisition of Skype and who initiated it.
Lets look at what people are buying…… Android yes (DroidX here)….. iPhone yep….. WinPhone7… nope.
WP7 sales are a rounding error in smartphone sales. Without the mobile MS cannot win. Period. They could support those “other” phones but you know they won’t.
Nokia? They have hitched their wagon to an anchor.
WinMobile has been a wreck for years. I understand programmers like because they know the tool set but I had to support those things. Android has been MUCH less trouble.
I would hope that they leave the web versions of their mail, calendar and contacts apps in iCloud because I use my MBP and iPhone (no iPad) and while the iPhone is a great device, I hate the little ass screen when I want to see my entire calendar as a month. This is why I’m using and syncing with Google Calendar. Not ideal but it works more reliably than Mobile Me. I want every file format supported by iCloud along with file system support so I can browse my files at home from any “i” device. I have far too much stuff and I’m not going to pay a zillion bucks to blow past that 5GB limit. A distributed architecture anyway is better than farting around with Apple/Google trying to keep everything we have in their data centers.
Except that the more data is freed from Windows the more that the segment of users that need a workstation class machine are free to use Macs. So while Apple never lets its legacy businesses make it blink in embracing the future, the mac actually has a healthy future.
What’s a thing of beauty to me, though, is how 4 years ago Apple figured out how to leverage a fun line of consumer music players into the business that would flank Microsoft for the future of computing (we now call that business iOS.) And I think the Zune shows that (1) MS saw it coming and (2) was utterly incapable of stopping it.
[…] iCloud kill Windows? I doubt it but it will certainly become decreasingly important in our personal lives over […]
[…] signed up in this window between Apple’s announcement and when its service goes live. Both Google and Apple will soon be battling for the right to store users’ data, a much different fight than that going on between operating systems. Any advantage in that coming […]
Have you considered the following points?
1. Mobile phone technology seem to go through a sea change every 3 years – Android came from nowhere – there is always a possibility of technology leapfrog
2. Why do we assume that future belongs to smart phones and tablets? – Future home will have plethora of other connected devices and some of them will have huge displays – I, somehow, can’t image iOS, Android or Chrome running on such device
3. Microsoft has an uncanny ability to make a comeback from nowhere – look at:
– Gaming
– Search engine
The odds that I will trust the cloud – any cloud – to store reliably my sensitive information or personal photos is precisely zero. As it will be for everyone else one day after they first lose them, or are denied access, or are obliged to open up their data to some snooping agency or venal lawyer.
Music,movies, calendar, appointments are not a problem.
Emails and other electronic communication has already gone out in the wild and is therefore in a sense halfway to the cloud anyway. But when I had my (unlocked – mea culpa) iPhone stolen and all my mails deleted that were sitting on the server, I discovered that I had lost a huge amount of vital data. Maybe the NSA had it but thats no use to me. Its all downloaded to my desktop now (and backed up on external disc and secured DVD).
There was a time when personal computing requirements could overload a desktop and at that time having a cloud to handle the heavy stuff might have been useful. But now it is more and more infrequent for a modern PC to be short of power for consumer tasks.
For synchronisation the cloud is effective, for computing power it is occasionally desirable, for storage of data in an age of tumbling personal storage costs it is an anchronism.
“The odds that I will trust the cloud – any cloud – to store reliably my sensitive information or personal photos is precisely zero. As it will be for everyone else one day after they first lose them…”
And yet relatively few users employ a truly reliable backup scheme (multiple formats, some offsite) even after loosing data on a traditional storage medium. The “cloud” has generally been more reliable than the hard disk in my desktop/laptop. I’m not talking privacy, just reliability. We hear about data losses in the news b/c when a cloud provider looses data, its 100s or 1000s of accounts at a time, whereas local data loss is measured at the single user, many of whom though upset, believe that’s just how computers work.
[…] Cringely » Blog Archive » iCloudâs real purpose: kill Windows – Cringely on technology https://www.cringely.com/2011/06/iclouds-real-purpose-is-to-kill-windows/ With no mobile market share to speak of and Windows 8 not due until 2013, Microsoft is likely to be […]
I think you’re right for the long-term. But the first victims of iCloud will be Web Apps.
[…] the limits you entered.” Don’t say we never do anything for you. (Via @katybairstow.) iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows I, Cringely“Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating […]
[…] Steve Jobs is willing to sacrifice the mac in order to make Windows irrelevant. Interesting. Here is the link if you want to learn about the upcoming fight to host your […]
[…] iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows I, Cringely“Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential. “Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.Both companies will be grabbing for data, claiming territory, and leaving Microsoft alone to defend a desktop that will soon cease to exist. “And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined.” Woah, slow down there. Chromebooks will nibble at Windows if they’re successful. iCloud will make teeny dents in Windows revenue. What Apple (and likely Google) will want is to tie you more closely into their best ecosystems. Microsoft can play that game too, though. It already tries to. […]
[…] iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows I, Cringely“Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential. “Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.Both companies will be grabbing for data, claiming territory, and leaving Microsoft alone to defend a desktop that will soon cease to exist. “And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined.” Woah, slow down there. Chromebooks will nibble at Windows if they’re successful. iCloud will make teeny dents in Windows revenue. What Apple (and likely Google) will want is to tie you more closely into their best ecosystems. Microsoft can play that game too, though. It already tries to. […]
Cringely, I am surprised you would write this article. You, of all people, should not be drinking the cool-aid. If I am an Apple User (my kids and I have iPhones) than this is great news. However, if I am a Windows user (my wife and I use Windows PCs), I don’t care about Apple. MS already offers SkyDrive, although Apple just raised the bar on integration.
The other player you have completely overlooked is Facebook. My kids (and someday, yours) are already “living” in Facebook 24/7/365 and that is where all their data will reside. Facebook is more closely aligned with MS than Apple.
Actually, I see MS/Facebook versus Apple versus Google playing out in the future. I think once Windows phone 7 introduces new hardware that closely aligns with Facebook (which is coming) and allows my son and his friends to play Call of Duty (which is probably also going to happen), then the whole mobile platform game changes. All Facebook has to do is announce how “cool” they think WP7 is and the entire future generation of computer zombies (our kids) will move over to that platform.
Keep in mind that Facebook is the MOST powerful thing I have seen in my 47 years… my kids are ADDICTED and yours will be too.
You should write about that in the future.
You do realize that Facebook does not require any Microsoft technology to create, run, and use? No Windows Servers needed. No SQL Server needed. No ASP.NET needed. Facebook also will create photo management you won’t need Windows for, and I’m sure have every intention to dominate gaming over the web without XBox.
Ballmer will have to give up his seat and the bank to make the Zuck brag about Windows 7/8.
[…] iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows – Cringely on technology – What this requires from Apple is a bold move that Microsoft would never make: Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn't beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential. […]
STEVE JOBS = PLAGIARIST
iCloud = Gmail
Gmail holds 8 gigs, iCloud: 5gigs
My personal data in the Cloud, NO FUCKING WAY!!
build PC: 300 bucks, MAC computer, overpriced and overly proprietary
Who am I?
I am a former Mac user and evangelist for 15 years, I worked at Apple and wouldn’t buy an Apple product ever again even if you gave it to me.
You’ve got to be kidding right? Gmail IS the biggest data sharing cloud of all – they have had access to your data since day 1 – marketing it to who ever wanted to glean information from it. All they dont do (atleast if you turn it off) is directly link you to the data. Have you not read about gmail accounts being hacked by the Chinese government?
If you have accessed the Internet, you are in the Cloud. IMAP or POP e-mail, Youtube, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter are all the Cloud. Apple brings them together on a device and you have fits?
Mac “Evangelists” like you are the very reason why Macs were not popular for “15 years”. Then Steve came along and said – “why cater to the 0.00005% of Macheads who dont have a clue about the consumer market. Lets make some userfriendly products and actually become desirable.”
Those of us who use Apple products are thankful that Mac “Evangelists” like you were ignored.
Finally, anyone who cant write 5 sentences without using a profanity cant be taken seriously. Do you talk like that in front of your kids all the time?
Like the availability pro sports keeps people from cutting the cable on TVs, business will keep Microsoft profitable for another 10-15 years. That’s plenty of time to adapt and resurge like, oh, shall we say IBM?
Microsoft might be behind in the device and mindshare battle, they are way ahead of Apple in the data center battle. They already have multiple, massive data centers with idle capacity, and the experience to ramp them up.
Windows 7/8, Windows Phone 7/Mango and the upcoming Windows Slate tablet is still a viable and competitive stable of products.
Apple is desperate to get their stuff in place and start whittling away at Microsoft’s 85% market share, before the giant reawakens…
[…] iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows I, Cringely“Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential. “Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome.Both companies will be grabbing for data, claiming territory, and leaving Microsoft alone to defend a desktop that will soon cease to exist. “And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined.” Woah, slow down there. Chromebooks will nibble at Windows if they’re successful. iCloud will make teeny dents in Windows revenue. What Apple (and likely Google) will want is to tie you more closely into their best ecosystems. Microsoft can play that game too, though. It already tries to. […]
“Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh…”
This seems to be the big take-away that all the pundits are using from Jobs’ comment about how they plan to deal with the digital hub problem.
They are demoting the Mac down to device level. Considering how important Apple and others see those other devices, that’s not a bad level to be placed in.
However, if life were only about entertainment, then I would agree it’s a demotion in comparison to ‘magical’ devices you can touch to control. Too many people who report and make opinions about tech news think that’s all the rest of us do, consume media all day long, like the slobs that we are.
Sadly, most people have to work for a living, have hobbies and do other complicated things beyond staring at photos we and others took.
I don’t see that Apple is sacrificing the Mac, it seems to have given it even more reason to live by linking it even more closely with those magical devices.
Apple isn’t going to kill Windows with the iCloud. Microsoft itself is going to do that with Windows 8 by tossing the interface metaphor upon which it is named to serve up one based on a mobile platform that is almost completely irrelevant.
This is going to be helpful in some ways and it’s going to suck in others.
I hate the idea of cloud computing, primarily for two reasons. One, I don’t want to pay for Internet access everywhere I go. I already pay for cable, internet AND a cell phone. It sounds like I’ll eventually need yet ANOTHER service to be connected just to get to my files. Ugh.
Two, I hate most of my devices that access the Internet other than my PC. I love my Android for games on my daily commuter train, but if I had to type on it as my exclusive device I’d probably gnaw my own legs off. When I’m on a bullet train I have to pay for wireless access (as I also have to do in many hotels or public areas) which means my laptop will be totally useless without paying for MORE access.
Maybe this will force me to read print newspapers instead of reading stuff online. *SIGH*
Bob, I love the way you force everyone to take a stand on the issue! It would seem most of your readers are too good for Apple. Most of them probably never expected iPod to survive this long either, but I’m sure they are not Job’s target customers anyway. Our children will soon wonder why we baby our personal computer so much, like the way we covet our CD/DVD collection. If you read this column and think you are tech-savvy it means you are already too old.
Those who think Apple only copies, just look around. The entire Web has mostly been redesigned to copy iOS look and feel in some way since iPhone came out.
Most external backup drives fail within 2 years. Hope you don’t trust your home-grown backup that much, even on a professional RAID/NAS, unless where you live will never have fire, flood, earthquake, tornados, or any accidents, and you have fire-proof basement with backup cooling system.
Watching most PC users around at work for the past 15 years I can say most is a waste of money. Software and devices are innovating so fast the in-house IT now are usually 1-2+ years behind in enterprise upgrades and seriously affecting IT projects, especially in times of budget and staff cuts. The Could is here, and it is the future (or back to the future). Consumers will go first. The only thing keeping enterprise IT from moving on is old PC-brainwashed IT managers still hanging around. Once they die off, and IT contracts forced to be more efficient and flexible, it will all fall like dominos, just like communism and the Easter Bloc.
The best way for Microsoft to survive, and thrive, IMO, is actually to keep on the Office cash cow – on iOS – keep writing software for iOS. Google is the one that truly wants Microsoft to die.
[…] 乔布斯的如意算盘是这样的：我们将把PC或Mac降级为仅仅是一台设备，和一部iPad、iPhone或一部iPod Touch别无二致。我们将把你的数字生活中心转移到云端。Sun微系统认为「网络就是计算机」，或者我们可以进一步说「我们的数据就是计算机」。这一点将颠覆数字时代。现任平台是Windows，因为几乎我们所有的数据和使用数据的能力都被绑定在Windows上。但是苹果的宣布彻底改变了这一点。突然间竞争变得与平台毫不相关，而这些数据通过廉价的下载应用在各个平台上得以处理。这需要苹果拿出微软所没有的魄力：乔布斯将为了干掉Windows而牺牲Macintosh。他没有直接针对Windows，而是让Windows变得无足轻重。预计Google很快也会做出类似的举动，给Android和Chrome增加自动备份、同步和迁移功能。这两家公司将为获得数据而战，圈占地盘，剩下微软独守即将消失的台式电脑。一旦我们所有的数据都存到iCloud后会发生什么呢？能方便地拿回数据吗？不。数据将永远在那里，我们会成为无法自拔的用户，陷入程度之深是微软永远无法想象的。苹果和Google将疯狂争夺我们的数据，因为一旦谁获得了这些数据，我们就会成为他们的永久用户。这场变革最多需要两代硬件，这里说的是移动时代，也就是说总共只需三年时间。在移动市场份额有限、Windows 8到2013年才上市的情况下，微软很有可能会成为迟到者，其市场份额最终将被转移给苹果和Google。有人说这不太可能，因为微软在企业级产品依然强大，但在过去十年中消费者一直在引领IT市场，并且移动时代的到来将加速这种趋势。微软越早转型为IBM那样的公司，对微软自身越有利，因为这似乎是他们的唯一机会。来源：cringely 作者：Robert X. Cringely […]
[…] http://bit.ly/iTcfuK […]
I can believe some IT Depts would be some scared of Macs that they would ban them from their network. IT has a vested interest in promoting their own job security, so it’s natural that Macs scare them.
When one of our (talented) graphic designers transfered to a larger corporate site in Libertyville and asked to have her Mac connected to the network, the biased IT admin responded that he “would buy her a box of crayons” instead. Gee, there’s a typical enlightened IT attitude for you.
I was the sysadmin manager at a medium sized company, (twelve years ago). My policy was to support both Macs and PCs and Solaris and Linux on our network. And guess what, everyone was happy and productive. Of course the Windows anti-virus stuff is a pain, but hey, I still let it on our network. I’m broad-minded — unlike these IT drones.
Sunny Guy
[…] in Ubuntu and encourages us to think about how the trend will impact free software in the future.Cringley focuses on Apple targeting Microsoft by making the desktop category just like a device and moving […]
You have a convincing argument, but its too weak to be true. Apple doesn’t need to beat or kill windows, They already lead the innovation in almost every front they work on including the OS segment. As far is i know & understand iCloud is a string that will keep all the apple users tied to apple for a long time once jump on to the band wagon of iCloud. BTW its an ambitious to assume that everybody in the world is going to start using an apple product to be tied to iCloud. Remember apple sells premium products, and not everybody buy’s premium stuff.
I always enjoy reading Bob’s posts when it involves gossip about Apple or Google killing Microsoft. And I usually enjoy reading the intelligent and insightful comments even more. But what happened this week? A bunch of juvenile “fanbois” and “haters” have taken over. What gives?
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
[…] — Robert X. Cringely, « iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows » […]
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
Apple typically does an incredible job at product differentiation, and the current industry evolution does nothing to change that. The iPhone, iPad, and Mac are designed for clearly different uses, and consumers understand those differences. The iPhone is adept at communication, the iPad focuses on media consumption and entertainment, while the Mac is focused on content creation. This is not to say that the uses are mutually exclusive; each device handles the three functions (communication, entertainment, and creation) with varying degrees of success and ease. As time progresses the lines between the devices inevitably begin to blur. Phone numbers will fade away, sooner, or later, and applications will scale to screens of all sizes. The iCloud hastens this process of amalgamation but will not single-handedly bring it about. A vivid analogy is to think of the global economic system, currently dominated by the United States (a Mac of sorts) – the global command center. As rising powers (think iPhone and iPad) gain prominence, the original power has less control over the other players, and the minor players begin to fend for themselves. Yet it is a state of relative – not absolute – decline for the old hegemon. Eventually all players become so tightly interlocked that they depend upon one another. To sacrifice any one component could jeopardize all the others – and destroy the halo effect from which Apple has greatly benefitted. To suggest that the Mac is going away any time soon is to suggest that the United States will be wiped off the face of the planet tomorrow.
[…] by some of the new features announced. • Do you agree with Bob Cringely’s assessment that iCloud’s real purpose is to kill Windows? • Has the PC really been […]
This is Cringely’s new secret way to generate hit counts: Predict Apple domination.
I’m still waiting for IPod to become the default video format for Blockbuster rentals.
You are aware that Blockbuster declared bankruptcy, right? That’s because Apple and others have eaten their lunch by offering a better product and/or service.
Nope, that’s Netflix and the red boxes. Apple didn’t have diddly to do with it.
Apple controls about 70% of the digitally distributed music and video business.
Apples plan doesn’t have your data living in the cloud. THe cloud is used for syncing. So all of your data can be stored locally if you want it to be. So leaving Apple is as easy as syncing a device to a different cloud.
Of course its lock in by doing things better and easier, but it is not a true lock in like Amazon Music locker would be.
To be fair, all indications are that iTunes Match songs will stay in the cloud unless you go out of your way to download those songs. Presumably, most users will retain a master copy of all their songs on their PCs, but it is conceivable to imagine people giving up physical storage to “rent” their own music over the cloud. The only problems would emerge if Apple’s service was shut down (bankruptcy, RIAA lawsuit, etc.), or if a user stopped subscribing. In the latter case, some important legal issues would arise – did the user actually own the digital files in the first place? can Apple condition people’s use of their own music on a subscription fee? are cloud services hosting valuable content offered at the volition of a provider, subject to dissolution at any time?
er, thats not the vibe i get from iTunes Match — i gather that it is ONLY for device-downloading.. that is, entirely a syncing service.
Wait a minute – iOS5 and iCloud aren’t available until Fall? That’s a long way away, especially since fall technically lasts until December. You can’t kill anything with vaporware.
I don’t think “vaporware” means what you think it means.
Releasing the developer SDK and preview beta three months ahead of a software products public release isn’t considered “vaporware”.
Sure. Microsoft and IBM used to do that a lot. Pre-announce stuff
and freeze the market and the competition
ICloud is already working, as in TODAU. It’s labeled as a “Beta” service, but that’s just to cover them if there are any snafus between now and the release of iOS 5.
But the title and premise of this story are really ludicrous.
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
[…] X. Cringelyは、彼のブログでこう言っている: かつてSun […]
you can say that again.
ROFL!!!
I hate Chinese flame wars…
[…] essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to […]
Great post.
I wrote quite a similar post (In Hebrew… sorry. https://www.newsgeek.co.il/apple-is-still-alive) but totally overlooked the Microsoft connection, a very interesting point.
The focus in what I wrote was that I believe that Apple is changing the focus from devices to “a need” or “a mission” that the device you buy should fulfill.
Meaning that you won’t buy a mobile phone, you will buy a device that is small enough to fit your pocket and can make phone calls. You will not buy a personal computer but one of the devices that has development (or video editing or whatever) capabilities etc.
All the devices will share the same data in the same applications through the cloud and changing from one device to another will be transparent to you as a user.
I think that the next major OS (OS 11 I guess) will bridge the gap between mobile devices and “real” computers and it will happen sooner than we think maybe two years (or less, depending on how quick and good the competition is).
It’s a general purpose machine! That’s what computers are. That’s what they have always been. To turn them into consumer products with a single purpose is ludicrous.
Thanks for sharing. Your post is a usfuel contribution.
The simple fact that Apple or Google will then ‘own’ my personal files forever, is why I will never full move over to any cloud. I imagine most business won’t either- if Lockheed can’t trust RSA SecurID to protect their own network, I doubt they would trust anyone to store it on a cloud.
Maybe I’m techo-old-fashion, but I mostly use the internet for things I don’t own, and never want to. Say an old episode of Mork and Mindy, nice to watch, but I don’t need to own it. And the stuff I do own, sits in a box (CPU) in my basement, like most things I own. But instead of being a slave to Apple for life, you can pretty much have you own personal cloud. No iCloud, but a MeCloud (someone has to be working on cheap software like this)- and it will never have a subscription cost- aside from my internet, which I’d pay anyway.
So is the Cloud a PC killer? I’m not to sure.
iCloud is a Windows killer, not a PC killer.
Apple is not interested in getting rid of PC’s – Macs, Windows or Unix-based – it is interested in making them appropriately irrelevant in the 90% of most people’s lives that do not require PC’s.
What the iDevices, iApps and iCloud are about is slowly proving to consumers and IT departments alike, that there is too high an overhead cost (financial, technical and emotional) of keeping your life mediated by Windows. The OS needs to get out of the way until it is needed and that means the Finder, Windows Explorer, dll’s, file systems, whatever.
This is a long process and most here will deny it until they find that they prefer (blank) on an iPad versus their desktop in the way they learned to prefer hearing music on their iPod versus their desktop. Neither has to destroy the desktop, just slowly reduce its use by a few minutes every day. Then when you need a desktop/workstation – whose will you use? Apple hopes it is a Mac and Google hopes it is a PC (Chrome?Windows?) and Microsoft hopes you want to use XBox Market points to buy Kinect 3.0.
Oh, and for all of us who do spend enough time on a PC (Mac or whatever), we can store our stuff on our harddrives just like we do now, without a MeCloud.
My mom just doesn’t have to do that with her 1000 songs and emails … and she couldn’t care less how they are stored. She just doesn’t want to deal with a computer.
Its already happening for me. Since I got my iPad 2, I’ve found that my use of my mac has gone down tremendously. Its so easy to carry around the house, and its instantly on.
Well my concept of the MeCloud, is software that would make connecting to your harddrive, anywhere (and on any devise- though I’m sure Apple wouldn’t allow it on the ipad) in the world appear seemless and invisible- just like access the iCloud. No bulky remote desktop, and more user friendly than a simply database.
Just hit your MeCloud at home while your waiting for the bus in another city to watch your favorite movie on your smartphone.
[…] I, Cringely wrote that Apple’s purpose is to “kill Microsoft” and that the iCloud will “leave Microsoft alone to defend a desktop that will soon cease to exist”. […]
[…] I, Cringely wrote that Apple’s purpose is to “kill Microsoft” and that the iCloud will “leave Microsoft alone to defend a desktop that will soon cease to exist”. […]
[…] I, Cringely wrote that Apple’s purpose is to “kill Microsoft” and that the iCloud will “leave Microsoft alone to defend a desktop that will soon cease to exist”. […]
[…] including new Mac and mobile operating systems and iCloud, a cloud syncing and storage service.I, Cringely wrote that Apple’s purpose is to “kill Microsoft” and that the iCloud will “leave Microsoft alone to […]
These re-link comments are really annoying..
One point. If we come up with a super efficient medical records process, what are we going to do with all of the jobs that people currently have in health care?
Health care and Government are the only ‘safe’ jobs from ‘Best shoring’ right now.
All those people will be out of work and there are no jobs for them…
Just saying…
also, Why not a column on Oracle and it’s anti-competitive behaviour?
You’ve commented on Apple, Microsoft, IBM. What about Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd ?
Protecting service jobs is short sighted anyway. I’d the US does not get back to production at home, our future is too bleak for the service jobs to matter. Consider the impact of production on the north and south’s relative fortunes in the Civil War, or the impact od US production capacity in the World Wars. Outsourcing production is diminishing the US to a degree that a few medical reords jobs will be irrelevant.
Which basically says that until the cost of living and debt levels comes down to the point where labor can cost as much as having it built and shipped in from elsewhere, we are going to be hurting. Thats why I am one of the few who like it when I hear that the housing market is bad and prices are plummeting. The faster housing prices can hit bottom, the faster the working class can afford the pay cut.
[…] 来源：cringely 作者：Robert X. Cringely […]
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
[…] OFF OF MY CLOUD! Bob Cringely says that Apple’s iCloud is designed to kill Windows: “Apple and Google will compete like crazy for […]
[…] OFF OF MY CLOUD! Bob Cringely says that Apple’s iCloud is designed to kill Windows: “Apple and Google will compete like crazy for […]
[…] OFF OF MY CLOUD! Bob Cringely says that Apple’s iCloud is designed to kill Windows: “Apple and Google will compete like crazy for […]
[…] a Recovery Won’t Fix (Harvard Business Review) • iCloud’s Real Purpose: Kill Windows (Cringely). See also Apple Now No. 1 in Flash Memory Consumption (Computer World) • Going, Going, Gone: Who […]
[…] 来源：cringely 作者：Robert X. Cringely […]
[…] the ink was even dry on the announcement, iCloud began to be touted as a Windows Killer , as a copy of Android Services, as the next big thing, attacked as not even having to do anything […]
Not sure it will kill Windows, but it will certainly elicit a response. This is a fantastic move by Apple and for those of us who want to be truly mobile, it is a God send!
I don’t think anything announced was particularly impressive. The timing is important. This press release was given the day before E3. This is just a standard Jobs tactic to keep the eye on Apple. And Cringely, shame on you for helping him. Still buddies after all this time?
PS. The big news is really the WII U.
*wink*
[…] more on Forbes Latest Adwords Money AuctionsMobile Mass Money – Sky-High EPCs For AffiliatesScam […]
Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even..
Thanks for post.
[…] making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it: Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even […]
[…] de Yanquilandia que hablan con tanta seguridad que parecen poseedores de la verdad absoluta. Y cito: With no mobile market share to speak of and Windows 8 not due until 2013, Microsoft is likely to […]
[…] Bob Cringley, http://www.cringley.com, wrote a very good piece on this which I recommend you read through. He believes that this strategy is intended by Apple to kill off Microsoft. I don’t necessarily agree with his view as I have no doubt that Gates and Co will respond, but his article makes for interesting reading. Have a look here. […]
[…] OFF OF MY CLOUD! Bob Cringely ѕауѕ including thе intention οf Apple’s iCloud іѕ calculated tο eradicate […]
[…] 2011 at 7:37 am and is filed under 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 […]
People you need to get your facts correct, The cloud was not invented by apple,as a matter of fact apple is using Microsoft’s Azure and Amazons back office to run there so called end to the computer as some of you put it. As for the world today and for some time, MS will still be the platform for a few reasons,
1) Price; Business is all about price and apple has always been way to expensive
2) To many people with a extensive background on and with MS products
3) MS is not going into a hole and hiding folks, if you look at all that MS offers they have much more and in the long much better products.
I work with and repair both and have for over 15 yrs, and a Apple computer no matter what foolish name you call it ( I something,X something, Or what ever) it is all the same thing over priced eye candy when it comes to the business world governmentsents. So people think much bigger than what most apple think and you might see the outside of the big picture.
apple never said it was going to remove the PC. it said it’s demoted it to just another device.
btw cant really take the rest of your message seriously. “over-priced candy” — er, you do realize the ipad is the market leader in pricing, right? so far the others are having a hard time matching it.
TOO, damn it. You can’t spell a simple 3-letter English word and I’m supposed to take your opinion seriously?
Ever since icloud was announced everyone is saying the sky is falling. (wow) Apple may own the servers and you may own the apple products but someone else owns the internet tubes. Good luck with that.
For a reference see ATT data pricing and how that evolved.
Apple has a short attention span for this stuff- I don’t see it changing very much.
MSN has had skydrive running for some time so nothing new from Apple
[…] но your data is the computer. да, можно подумать, что Apple готовы пожертвовать своими компьютерами[3], и одним махом прыгнуть в этот […]
[…] more on Forbes This entry was posted in Uncategorized. « Bulletstorm’s Funniest Quotes […]
Five years ago, If you wanted to buy a smart phone, your three real choices were a Windows, Symbian and Blackberry device. Only Google (who was also a non-player in the mobile phone market at that time) was nimble enough to respond to the iPhone in a timely manner.
Why Google and not the others? Google was a new company with a clearer view of the modern world. Apple, while an older company, was reinventing themselves under the guidance of the returned Steve Jobs.
IMHO, Windows and even RIM can still survive but their boards need to replace the leadership. Listening to Balmer’s interviews, he really, really does not get it. Microsoft will survive for a while due to their deep pockets and enterprise dominance. But I believe that even that market can be taken from them if they aren’t careful.
+1
[…] Robert X. Cringely: The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps. […]
I’m being lazy and not reading through all of the comments first, so I’m sure someone has already said it, but dude, Google got there first. https://www.google.com/chromebook/
As for enterprise sales, NOAA has scrapped MS Outlook for their default email/calendar platform in favor of…. Google Apps.
“What this requires from Apple is a bold move that Microsoft would never make: Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential.”
Interesting use of the wheord ‘sacrifice’ here.. he’s demoting the Mac to a ‘high powered’ portable device, but it’s still a very expensive and very profitable business. As the 4th product line in a range that goes from iPod touch, to iPhone, to iPad, and then Mac.. the Apple Ecosystem is very interesting nowadays. And, as you suggest, if you really want to get a picture of what this does to Windows, just include the iPad in the next quarter’s ‘PC marketshare’ numbers. MS’s stock will drop 30% in a day.
The quiet man in the background is Apple TV. Rumors of Apple iOS driven televisions keep popping up on a regular basis. I had a friend over the other night and showed her what I can do with my A-TV and she was surprised. The next steps are unfolding – iCloud, iOS5, Lion. What could Apple add to that — license iOS for TV manufacturers with strict controls, or produce an Apple branded TV. If Cringley is correct and Apple now controls the major patents around LTE it means they , they could also look at buying Clearwire and rolling it out nationwide with a massive multi-billion dollar investment.
Go back and listen to Steve Jobs’ commencement address again. You are listening to a man who is aware of his mortality. He is focused like a laser on his legacy. This makes him the most dangerous man in Technology because he is also one of the few who has real ‘Vision’.
Clearwire and rolling it out nationwide with a massive multi-billion dollar investment.
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This makes him the most dangerous man in Technology because he is also one of the few who has real ‘Vision’.
[…] Robert X. Cringely, « iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows », 7 juin […]
App-le is straight out trying to turbo-boost a trend to kill Windows by devaluing the operating system as the most important thing to the user.
Google Chrome’s OS arrival hammers this home. An OS is a portal to cloud apps. $29.99 for Lion will see you able to buy the latest apps and that is where the revenue will come from. An expensive upgrade to Win8 will need to bundle so much or not be worth it. The OS must be much more an ecosystem and MS must be very worried that tentative steps with the Windows Phone have failed.
The operating system is beginning to evaporate into the cloud.
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Getting rid of Windows based PC’s?
Nuts.
As an accountant I have over twenty years taxation and accounting data for my clients which can only be assessed by Windows based software —- and the tax act requires me to keep those data for at least six years.
AND, last time I shop around, I cannot even find a workable Apples accounting software package that can handle HST, GST, PST. for various provinces, etc. in Canada for any size of businesses, not to mention filing various tax returns (personal, corporation, trust, etc.) based on the Apples plateform.
Yes, if you simply want fun, go ahead with i-products. But for serious work in business and finance, even doing bookkeeping for mom-and-pop corner stores or that small hot dog stand, you simply cannot do away with Windows.
Nuts is right, and also nuts to people who think production graphics and text management can be done on an iPad, or even worse, an iPhone. Let’s not forget, I have to transmit those files to somebody else’s PC when they’re done, and that other person needs to be able to open them and screw them up and then send them back for me to fix.
I probably have an old model in my head, but I’ve done whatever to activate iCloud for my iPhone and iPad – and I want to know – where is it? Why can’t I manage it? Why can’t I even see it? What if I want to erase something that’s there, and what if I want more than music and video and photographs “there” – wherever it is?
There’s a lot of work gets done on a PC. I think Steve Jobs targeted the part of my brain that isn’t involved in work, the part that maybe shouldn’t care where the cloud is. The rest of my brain wants to see the cloud.
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Great article. I still cannot decide if I want to transition to Apple Cloud or Google Cloud. I am doing half and half now, but I’d better choose one, soon. Thanks for posting.
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The truth is the biggest corporate Cloud today is not an iCloud. It is owned by a telephone company aka CenturyLink. The whole thing is a con anyway. Anyone who knows how to use a thumb drive, DVD/CD or external drive, and knows how to copy files owns a Cloud (it probably won’t ever be hacked or the information sold for profit).
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Not any, you do not need an Apple ID to activate a tool to iOS 7.
The Setup Assistant won’t require an Apple ID.
You can elect to skip that action.
An Apple ID should be only needed to make use of iMessage, to make use of Facetime via
Apple ID, to make use of iCloud to burn or sync info, or to make
purchases & downloads inside the iTunes & Request stores.
It is possible to use an iPhone lacking any Apple ID.
In addition, this sounds a lot more like an issue using Activation Lock, the
spot that the user needs the last Apple ID & Password.
Creating a fresh Apple ID will never resolve
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