“Did Apple invent the Cloud yet?” asked one leading industry analyst on Twitter on Monday evening.
It was moment of amusing cynicism, but he had a point: the Apple announcement of iCloud in San Francisco puts the terminology of Cloud Computing right onto the breakfast tables of Mr and Mrs Smith of DailyMail-land.
Of course, if Mr and Mrs Smith had a Hotmail or a G-Mail account – never mind Smith Minors on Facebook! - then they were already Cloud Computing users of course – they probably just hadn't read about it in those terms.
But now that Apple's decided they're going to the iCloud, the mainstream media has been falling all over itself with snazzy little diagrams to explain what this Cloud stuff is. Redefining the Cloud was Steve Jobs starting point in fact when he said:
What Jobs makes this Cloud stuff sound like is – inevitably - pretty cool and comes with some nice design. Jobs told the world:
Excellent – but what is it? Well of course the main focus of the mass media coverage for the iCloud announcement was the music angle. Is this the death of the record collection? Can we now access our tunes from anywhere we like, whenever we like? To that end, as part of iCloud, Apple introduced a $24.99 music feature called iTunes Match that will scan every song in users’ libraries and match it with a copy in the Cloud. That means customers don’t have to upload all their music song by song, a requirement on services introduced by Google and Amazon.
And it's going to be free: iCloud will come as a free download when Apple releases the new version of iOS this autumn and will include 5 gigabytes of free storage for users’ files, plus unlimited room for purchased apps and books, and recent photos. In fact, by the end of the year, iCloud will be wired into the DNA of everything Apple makes – and will reach into the business world.
One demo on stage had an Apple exec take a photo with his iPhone which uploaded it into iCloud where it had been downloaded into iPhoto before he'd had time to pick up his iPad. To demonstrate business angles, the same Apple exec edited a presentation slide using his iPhone which immediately ensured that the same change was made to the copy sitting on his iPad.
From a wider industry point of view there are other implications. From the man who battled against the IBM PC, lost, then came back again to win, came the threat-dressed-as-a-good-sounding-thing:
Critics will argue that Apple's vision of the Cloud is built around selling more devices in the form of iPads and so on, and there's inevitably some merit to this – and this presents an opportunity to the likes of Google and DropBox to exploit their ability to offer Cloud services beyond the Apple devices platform. But there will also be plenty of people quite happy to tie themselves to that platform. Scott Sutherland, market analyst at Wedbush Securities, noted:
But there's also a longer term shift in Apple's own strategy here, as Gartner's Michael Gartenberg noted:
So is this a gamechanger? Richard Holway of research firm TechMarketView, suggests:
But he adds that there are those Tech Establishment companies that need to be worried today:
Of course it can be argued that we've been sort of here before – with Apple's MobileMe. Held back by an annual subscription fee, it's managed to hook 3 million users, according to Forrester Research – which in potential Cloud Computing terms is a drop in the ocean of course. Jobs admitted:
Will Apple succeed? Do we now add the firm's name to the list of major Cloud players? Almost certainly. It's a game changer – which game it is that's changed remains to be seen, but this will reach beyond being able to access Adele in the Clouds.
In the audience at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco on Monday was one of the new 'Cloud Establishment', Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, inveterate iPad addict and a man who's picked up a few tips from Jobs along the way on how to run a revolution. He voiced his approval when he tweeted of Jobs from the iCloud launch:
As for Jobs himself, when considering his Cloudy ambitions, it's worth considering one quietly delivered statement:
