Once a year in San Francisco, Apple summons its third-party application engineers to the World Wide Developers Conference. Since Steve Jobs’ return to the company the event has grown in attendance and importance. One turning point was the 2002 introduction of OS X, a genuinely modern Mac OS, built on a Unix foundation. Then there was the 2008 WWDC featuring iPhone native apps and the epoch-making iOS App Store. (Yes, “epoch-making” sounds a bit grand, but it really was the birth of a new era.)
This year’s program was more loaded than usual, offering three main topics: A major OS X release, dubbed Lion, slated for this Summer; a new version of the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch for the fall (iOS5); and iCloud.
The two-hour keynote is worth your while. Always entertaining, Steve and his co-presenters convey the massive effort that went into moving Apple’s engineering armies on these three fronts — with a mere 2% of revenue in R&D expenses.
But let’s focus on iCloud.
Apple has often been involved in feature-list schoolyard squabbles of the Mine-Is-Longer-Than-Yours type. Two years ago, Steve Ballmer, our favorite rhetorician, scoffed that the MacBook is an Intel laptop with an Apple logo slapped on the lid. He might as well have noted that all cars have wheels — round and black, mostly — and then gone on to sneer at brands commanding higher prices than your basic Chevrolet. (I’ve owned half a dozen of the latter.) In the world of cars, the value of the How is well understood: All cubic inches aren’t born equal.
For computers, we’re getting there. The PC market is in the doldrums: Shipments are stagnant, Apple claims a 1% drop in Q2 2011 vs Q2 2010 while, during the same time period, Mac shipments grew 28%. It can’t be the Intel processors, it is How they are driven.
Unsurprisingly, Apple’s iCloud announcement has been met with the same type of misunderstanding: ‘OK, after all these years, Apple finally makes the plunge into the Cloud. The Cloud is the Cloud. Or, rather, Google is the Cloud. What’s the BFD?’
A strong dose of skepticism is warranted. Even Steve calls MobileMe, his company’s previous effort, ‘Not our finest hour’. Both What and How fell frustratingly short of the standards of polish, simplicity and agility Apple is known and financially rewarded for. MobileMe’s 2008 vintage was plonk. This led to apologies, subscription extensions, and management changes. Improvements followed, including the well-regarded Find My iPhone service.
But both What and How remained deficient.
The feature list barely differentiated MobileMe from other services. Mail, Calendar, Address Book, Photo Galleries, Web Hosting, File Storage are offered elsewhere on the Web by a long list of companies: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, DropBox, Flickr… Google, followed by Microsoft and others, also offer Web Apps, Google Docs being the best known example, an “Office Suite” in the Cloud, accessible anywhere, from any computer with a Net connection and a decent browser. This led many, yours truly included, to wonder: Does Dear Leader “grok the Cloud”? Does Apple have it in its DNA to do be a serious participant in the Cloud Computing revolution.
MobileMe’s reliability remained subpar, often showing evidence of “silos”, of poorly interconnected modules, a Cloud Computing cardinal sin, as recounted in the What I Want for my Mac Monday Note.
Against this tattered backdrop, iCloud walks on stage. The most striking difference with MobileMe and other Web-based offerings already mentioned, is the shift away from the browser. I’ll use a word-processor document to illustrate. In both cases we’ll assume you’ve already stated your credentials, login and password for Google, Apple ID, and password for iCloud. With Google Docs, you fire up your browser, enter the URL for your service, compose or edit a document, file it in a folder in Google’s Cloud, and it’s ready for you from any computer anywhere.
With iCloud, you fire up your word processor, Pages for the time being, and compose. No saving, no URL for a Web service. You get up and leave. In the queue at the airport you remember something, you fire up Pages on your iPhone and add the brilliant idea that just came to you. But how do you access the Pages document from your Mac at the office? You don’t have to “access” it, it’s already there on your iPhone, your iPad or, sitting at the gate after security, on your MacBook. Your document was automagically saved and pushed to your device. No hands, the system does it for you — and propagates the edits you just made.
(This is why, the week before the WWDC, Apple published “universal” — meaning iPhone + iPad + iPod Touch — versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I’m not sure I would want to write this Monday Note on an iPhone but, in a pinch, I can fix a mistake using the small device.)
This is the BFD, this is the How. Such behavior is available or will be extended to all applications and content.
The Google model sees everything through a browser. Apple’s iCloud model uses local apps transparently interconnected through the Cloud. Browsers Everywhere vs. Apps Everywhere.
Another important feature is the demotion of the PC as the media hub or, if you prefer, the untethering of our iDevices from the personal computer. From now on, content and apps are purchased, downloaded, updated wirelessly, PC-Free. And seamlessly propagated to all devices with the same Apple ID.
The demos look good, the iCloud technical sessions at the WWDC went well. But the full-scale implementation remains to be field-tested. For the document editing example, Apple used an iPad to iPhone and back example, and merely mentioned the Mac as a participant later in the presentation. Annoying details such as iWork file format incompatibilities between Macs and iDevices need closer inspection as they might make reality a little less pristine than the theory.
For developers, the new APIs just released will enable more applications to offer the seamless multi-device updates just demonstrated.
If iCloud works as represented, it will be very competitive — and the price is right: free for the first 5Gb of documents. (Content such as music or video and apps don’t count in those 5Gb.)
The “free” iCloud reminds us of Apple’s real business model. They want to sell lots of devices, everything else supports this goal. It seems iCloud’s easy, executive-proof How will sell a lot nicely interconnected Apple hardware. For competitors, weaving together a Brand X laptop, a Brand Y smartphone and a Brand Z tablet won’t be as easy or inexpensive.
To be continued as competitors takes Apple’s theory apart and as both developers and the company move the iCloud story into reality.
For further perspective, a few links:
- A prescient (April 15th, 2011) “Cutting That Cord” piece by John Gruber.
- A 10,000 feet overview by Philip Ellmer-Dewitt, in Fortune’s Apple 2.0.
- Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry thinks iCloud annoys Google and humiliates Microsoft.
- John Paczkowski’s take in All Things D: iCloud: The Mother of All Halos.
- Business Insider thinks Microsoft had a service “just like iCloud” for Windows Mobile.
- Walt Mossberg’s iCloud take, interviewed by Charlie Rose.
- Steve Jobs’ “It Just Works”, as seen by MG Siegler on TechCrunch.
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23 Comments
If Apple is syncing these files between all of your devices, they are magically solving a problem that has vexed them and others for years. But there is still a limited local storage problem on mobiles – what gets synced and what doesn’t. If they are not syncing, then downloading files to be worked on locally and pushed back up is vastly less efficient than presenting my current work in a browser.
BTW, Google’s cloud is accessible on numerous apps on my Android, providing real mobile optimized experiences.
Oh, the web-based cloud apps run on pretty much any device on the planet (no additional purchase necessary) while iCloud requires late-model Apple devices running current versions of purchased apps. As you don’t note, this must be a trivial difference.
Note that 5 GB is the FREE Storage space available on iCloud.
This nicely and easily fits on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. This includes the iPhone 3Gs with 8 GB of storage. You will still have room for other data including music.
I hope we can purchase MORE STORAGE. This is important for those who have larger data storage needs.
Completely on-the-spot analysis, as usual. I made almost the same one, but in French here : http://blog.gete.net/2011/06/09/wwdc-2011-la-nouvelle-ere-dapple/ . BTW, small error : Mac OS X was previewed in January 2000 and released in March 2001.
Always a pleasure to read your analysis
@Ed, re: your point about Google’s cloud being widely accessible. It’s great as far as it goes, but is tied to tasks that work very well (a) thru the browser, which especially disfavors rich media, and (b) always online. Neither of these approach the service levels that Apple is aiming at.
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And the ubiquity you mention IS appropriate to a DropBox style service, where you consciously upload/download to various devices *and* individuals (the latter a sharp distinction against iCloud’s one user, multiple tools implementation). But iCloud in no way precludes those models; I still have “Save to DropBox” available.
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But where iCloud excels, uniquely, is actually in the 45 minutes right AFTER @JLG’s example: you got thru Security and are on the plane, reading your iPad, and have that “Ahah!” moment. You’re off the grid but your document was thoughtfully placed on your device, ready to update, without your worrying about it. Yes, there ARE technical details about capacity, etc., to sweat, and perhaps a LRU cache model will be available, plus potentially (non-Apple; fussy) user overrides. But note Apple’s commitment to “delta” synchronizations and backups: only CHANGES need be noted. Synchronizations are quick even over crummy links.
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There are many more usage models once the developers build in the features into their apps: the architect who sweats over designs and renderings on her desktop, can mark them up at the middle-of-nowhere client site, then incorporate those notes into the desktop design — all without any janitorial work. The business expense system that’s a pain to use in the field because it now needs high-bandwidth connectivity just to update when I have a few minutes. The InstaPaper inbox. There are just too many times when mobile connectivity isn’t up to the demands of high-productivity work in real-time, but can be counted on to work in the background. THIS is the killer feature of iCloud.
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If it goes well, look for DropBox-type integration in v 2.0. I was about to say that somebody’s Seppuku was the likely consequence if it stumbled, but Dear Leader has his fingerprints all over this, the sole aspect of announcements he did NOT delegate. I imagine this has been wildly over-provisioned, both in technical and support capacities.
Keen observations, as always! One thing Apple has well under its belt is infrastructure — being able to update tens (hundreds?) of millions of devices planet-wide with gigabyte downloads, and often, not to mention the iTunes infrastructure. Note the competitor’s struggles here. So, that part has been ready for a while.
As for synchronization, Apple has learned and continues to optimize (in spite of calling it different names over time such as eWorld, iTools, .mac, iWork, MobileMe). Walt aptly noted upcoming smaller delta updates, and in time the autosave feature will further decrease the size of and even eliminate version conflicts. It’s even possible to one day make a change on your iPad and watch it show up on the same document open on your Mac moments later.
Having myself seen the iCloud APIs, I can say that the developer community will not only help Apple further debug and refine syncing, but they will surely create remarkable and never before seen high-performance, rich native apps; realizations of what just couldn’t be done well, or even attempted in a browser. (And if it makes sense to “check out” a document to edit it without messy conflicts, developers can add that themselves.) It’s a simple fact that many apps that would have benefited from cloud storage and syncing weren’t even attempted because few developers have the resources to implement it, much less reliably.
The browser platform is a mess, a mishmash of fixes to a deeply flawed foundation that still pales in comparison to native apps. Ubiquity is likely one of it’s few assets. (That’s another discussion, of course.) And now the difference between the two will be brought into sharper focus as apps start to appear. This is going to be fun!
iCloud seems just another attempt to turn the Internet into a walled garden. No surprise that Apple has chosen a path to keep apps native on _their_ hardware and treat the internet like a virtual hard drive.
My money goes on Google’s way – smart HTML browsers capable of running 90% of everyday productivity apps. On _any_ hardware.
Marius – I’m betting on Apple/iCloud and you would too if you’d come with me on my journeys – Example…Was in rural america (no desolate, just rural) this weekend. Very little (and 1X at most) data connectivity with Verizon & no obvious WiFi in either of the two closest towns. With Google and browser focused clouds, I’d have been screwed. This isn’t going to change any time soon. If you never leave the city or never get off the freeway, go for the Google thang but otherwise you’ll wish it was apps and local docs.
PXLated. Surely Apple’s intent is to lock you into their hardware rather than looking after the Internet Deprived poor country cousins.
By the way, down here in Australia, we have excellent high speed mobile broadband coverage for 98% of the population by a single carrier. I am a sailor and I get broadband coverage all down the East Coast, even up to 35 Miles off shore.
Well Marius, I glad for you but that’s not even close to being the case here. As far as Apple locking one in, yes, they want to sell devices but Google wants to sell “you”. I’ll take the former, I know what I’m getting.
The iCloud does not solve my personal problems. I have vast quantities of media >5 gig in the form of photos. Flickr handles that well, though I worry about Yahoo always being around. And I have very confidential work-related matter I might not trust even to Apple security (CERTAINLY never to MSFT). This argues for local storage and back-up.
@Marius, I really think you have the cart before the horse in worrying about being locked in to Apple. There are real considerations how valuable the iCloud approach will be, and even some realistic concern about whether Apple can pull it off technically. But a policy of staying away from a useful service because you might find it too hard to leave, what’s that about?
Most iPhone and iPad users have a trivial investment in apps. (My ~ $100 or so is driven by one app that I already moved from the Palm platform, so even big spenders are likely safe.) You can get your music (as I do, almost exclusively) without DRM and exactly as portable. My wife just yesterday had AT&T capture the address book from a phone, so those several hundred entries easily move, too.
Could you get hooked? Apple certainly hopes so. But not because it would be hard to get out; rather, because you might enjoy the experience enough to stay.
So the effort to move would seem trivial. While I generally keep a jaundiced, sometimes proudly cynical eye on companies, I think you might reconsider whether your stated posture on the service is really based on factual issues.
@tom b, I hope you have those photos backed up. ANY data that is valuable should be in multiple locations. No need to specifically disrespect Flickr. Stuff happens, whether from hackers, hardware failure, missed renewal notices while you’re traveling or a too-hasty read of one.
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It’s common sense: if it was worth all the time & effort to upload all those photos, it must be worth a few dollars to have them backed up, say onto a $50 USB drive.
@Walt, I’m not worried about being locked in by Apple, we’re a happy hybrid household and intend to keep it that way. I simply think their approach to “cloud computing” is wrong headed, focused on locking in users, under the guise of building better user experience. Their competition is building apps in the cloud and giving users access to them via a HTML5 browsers. That seems to me a better way, both technically and as a roaming user. I shudder to think what Apple’s approach to collaborative editing will be…
@Marius Coonmans: “…the guise of building better user experience”… This is where a lot of us will disagree on priorities, for it is the main reason for some to stay away from apple, and other to embrace it.
Thank you for this great blog too, where we can dissent “philosophically” without insulting each other!
Marius “Their competition is building apps in the cloud and giving users access to them via a HTML5 browsers” – Yes but, as mentioned, that ONLY works if you have access, most can’t count on it. Plus, HTML5 is a long way off from giving you the experience a native app can and will continue to be behind as they progress with those standards way slower than Apple and native technologies.
Whilst it is clear that iCloud is well thought out, and Apple has done much to simplify things for users, there are a few unanswered questions.
What bothers me is the lack of file system within Apps. What happens when I have 200 Pages documents
….from the last 2 years. How do I find things?! Can I sort by subject or group similar docs In folders?!…
No connection, no files — or why I think Google’s cloud strategy will fail.
Cloud services may only go down 1% of the time but it will frustrate and inconvenience your customers 100% of the time. I want local files but I don’t need all my files all the time. Just let me keep the ones I want and the others close by.
@Marius, the grand experiment of Google Wave crashed and burned because nobody could figure out how to use it / what it was. You are right to shudder at how Apple would attack collaborative edits; you should fear other efforts, too.
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PS: I know my usage pattern is quite unusual (I fly 50X/year, commute on subways; often drive to Northern California rural counties where there’s no coverage) but I can’t quite understand how a mobile device will work in 2011 or 2012 if it’s contingent on a high-speed connection to the grid 24X7. And this AM I counted a couple dozen of my apps that would be impossible or awful both to write and use over something as slow as 3G/HTML.
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Even the Great Google is touting Chrome-specific features for desktops. Standards and ubiquity are great, but so are functionality and experimentation.
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I look at the various tablet offerings — Playbook, TouchPad, even the Androids — and see feature tablets — feature phones with big screens: a couple of key functions written by the manufacturer and no likelihood of my being able to do the sort of things I take for granted on my laptop or phone. I use apps all day on my work machines; I use apps for hours on end on my personal laptop (though much more browsing); I use apps all day on my phone. Why would I not want that level of having apps written for what I do on a tablet?
iCloud is just iSync Over-The-Air.
It’s great, instant backup and pushed purchases will improve the user experience day by day.
But is it really a “cloud” service ?
Well, written laid out and written article. Apple has a chance to be a top contender. Google, is smart but as of late just seems to be copying everyone else and trying to do it better. Which is not working to well for them.
I like Google Docs, great feature, but needs more work. And Gbuzz, ugh. Not a fan. Twitter, but worse. Apple can do this, and they can do more.
Thanks again for the great article.
lance.
Salutation, Merci d avoir partagé cet article avec nous. Merci 1000 fois ! bonne continuation.
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