I get pretty annoyed by its generic use, but I'm hopeful that we're seeing a narrowing of the term here.
Larry Ellison is right, we've had the "cloud" forever -- the network is the cloud -- but I think there's a good fit for the term "cloud" in the user space. "Cloud" describes a user experience. It's something that laymen can latch on to and begin to identify with an experience. While it abstracts detail, it's useful for marketing. The user may think:
"When I access Google Apps from this computer, my environment and experience are exactly the same as it is on any other computer. This is cloud computing."
The same would would apply for iCloud. Any device registered under your account works interchangeably.
Operating in the cloud means interchangeability of some underlying component that users are used to having to think about. E.g., "Oh, I'm not at my computer, so I can't access that document."
As an industry, we should try to narrow our usage the term to refer to services that deliver a location and device agnostic view of the entire end-user experience.
Seems like this just is echoing Gruber from earlier this week:
"But Google’s vision is about software you run in a web browser. Apple’s is about native apps you run on devices. Apple is as committed to native apps — on the desktop, tablet, and handheld — as it has ever been."
Microsoft has a marketing problem, they have a lot of cloud services like Skydrive, Live Mesh etc. but are not able to grab the attention of consumers or media like Jobs is able to, on stage.
However, Windows 8 seems to be coming with a ton of integrated cloud features so I don't know about the humiliation part.I just don't see that their marketshare is affected more than 1% specifically due to the cloud services in Lion.
By MS-only, I refer to Microsoft technologies and development tools for Windows, Windows Phone, Azure. Early adopters (alpha geeks, developers, etc) generally use Macbooks now which you can see for yourself at any tech conference. Microsoft really doesn't market to this group, it pretends they don't exist.
Taking all Apple's emphasis on design, marketing, etc., aside. It starts very simple: Steve Jobs looks like a sympathetic guy on stage that we could easily emphasize with. Steve Ballmer looks, let's put it bluntly, unsympathetic and rude.
This difference is clearly visible in every fiber of marketing material from both companies. Apple marketing feels friendly and fresh, while Microsoft's tends to feel aggressive. Sometimes Microsoft attempts to copy Apple's marketing style, but it feels faked or superficial.
I don't think the issue here is that Jobs looks frail while Ballmer looks like he's been eating for two. People aren't buying tens of millions of iPhones out of pity.
Apple has made its recent success off developing and marketing products that consumers want to buy and that make them happy to use (look at how many people by an iPod or iPhone and go on to become Mac owners.) Microsoft mostly makes it way off of enterprise sales and bundling with PCs. That's fine, but it doesn't tend to lead to a culture that creates products that end consumers get really juiced about.
When Microsoft makes something, it gets a little coverage and then everybody forgets about it. I agree, they don't publicise their Internet-based products enough.
Microsoft does not really care too much though if these products do not take off because in their eyes there is not enough money in them.
Using SkyDrive to augment your Office installation is great. Hopefully, they integrate it with Windows as a whole. I have a feeling though that when they think about that integration Microsoft wonders if the antitrust hammer will come down on them.
I'm sure Windows 8 will be a huge improvement over iOS5. It has to be to adhere to corporate needs. No large buiness is going to want to put anything in Apple's datacenters, and iOS5 will not allow any type of serious adminitstration or configuration, or it would threaten what Apple is trying to build. i.e. iOS5 comes in any color you like, as long as it's black or white.
When Win8 is released, it will be the defacto standard inside Fortune 500s and that's all Microsoft really cares about.
I don't know that anything Apple is doing is that revolutionary, the difference is that Apple and Jobs are phenomenal at presenting the idea so that people actually get it.
I'm sure there are a lot of Microsoft execs right now that are saying "we already do that with product X" and pretty pissed off that they were never able to sell product X over 5 years the way Apple did in an hour.
The bottom line is that Apple knows how to sell products to consumers, and Microsoft doesn't. Microsoft and Google both suffer from the same disease, they try to sell a product, not address a need. They might be the same thing in the end, and Microsoft might have even gotten there first, but Apple really gets marketing.
The difference is more nuanced than sales. At Apple designers rule, and because Steve understands design, they higher excellent designers. At Microsoft program manager's rule, and a PM is neither a technologist nor a designer. They represent "the user". As a result Microsoft is great at feature-rich products that solve many problems. At Apple, they focus on the human side of technology. They try to make things easier to use. They focus on design details and strive for minimalism while still being feature rich. At Microsoft a PM could never remove an on/off button from an MP3 player.
Microsoft's cloud strategy is very good for their business. They will run many enterprise products in the cloud successfully (Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) that generate revenue. You just won't read about them in sfgate.
I think the difference is that designers have a vision of what the users really want, as opposed to what they say (or even think) they want. Whereas the PMs (in that example) are more the focus-group types.
Design is more than that. It is what users really want, but it is also how they feel when they use it, how it works, how it looks, etc. PMs are great at getting projects done. They herd cats. But very few have studied design, industrial design, art history, architecture, literature, etc.
Jonathan Ive studied industrial design. Steven Sinofsky studied computer science.
I'm not sure if there's any particular significance to this, but the current head of PM for Windows is Jensen Harris and his degree was in music composition.
Apple is indeed good at marketing, but how do we know they going to succeed at marketing iCloud? We haven't even really seen any marketing about iCloud beyond the keynote, which is them preaching to the choir and frankly anyone watching already "got it". After all, Apple pretty much never pitches software, and the idea of an iPhone/iPad/Mac commercial saying we keep everything in sync is fairly weak (most consumers already have that experience with their phone without even thinking about it). iCloud after all is in part a rebranding of a product that has already failed multiple times already.
Past success doesn't even imply future success, and past failure is even worse.
Apple is indeed good at marketing, but how do we know they going to succeed at marketing iCloud? [...] iCloud after all is in part a rebranding of a product that has already failed multiple times already.
Good question. But from a user perspective MobileMe syncing already works very well. When I buy a new Mac or iOS device, I simply configure my MobileMe account and automatically have my contacts, calendars, notes, and on the Mac preferences, dock items, etc.
They could have made the synchronization functionality of MobileMe free, and slowly add the features announced for iCloud. But announcing it as a new product is a far smarter marketing move. iCloud has dominated deadlines for days now, and people see it as something different from MobileMe.
The difference might be that on a new OS X install in the near future, pressing Save on a document open in even a simple text editor will automatically sync that document to "the cloud" and all my devices.
No desktop app that I'm aware of from Microsoft does that today out of the box, as the default action. Sure you can easily sync stuff with Dropbox or whatever Microsoft's product is, or you can do word processing in your browser with Google Docs - but it sounds like with iCloud that Apple will be the first to offer this type of syncing as the default, no-extra-steps-or-thinking option.
Auto-save coming to games since 10 years ago. Who cares? This is OS-wide auto save and heavily promoted as how all modern OS X apps should behave. That's far bigger than implementing it in one suite of software and stopping there.
> Microsoft and Google both suffer from the same disease, they try to sell a product, not address a need.
Actually, Chrome and Nexus-branded Android phones are the only Google products that I've seen advertised, ever. Of their hundreds of products, those 2 are the only ones that they're trying to "sell". In fact, Wave was pretty much their only product that comes to mind that didn't address a need (or at least that was the public perception), hence its inevitable demise. The rest (Search, Gmail, Docs, Android, Chrome, etc) were all direct responses to problems that people had.
There is A LOT of ads for google chrome in France. By a lot I mean that there were entire metro stations with every single ad spots paid by google for chrome in Paris.
Google advertising for non-Chrome/Android isn't common, but it does happen. For example, I was in Vegas a few months ago and the airport had a bunch of ads for Hotpot.
I don't agree that this is about "getting" marketing. You may not mean it this way, but when people describe Apple as being a marketing company, the implication is that given the exact same product, Apple would succeed where Microsoft would fail. The truth is, Apple doesn't build the exact same products as Microsoft. What Apple does is what Dropbox did: They take a product and build what people actually want. People want A, B, and C, so Apple builds that. People don't care about technology X, Y or Z, so Apple doesn't build that or hides it under the covers.
People want their stuff to just be there. People actually don't care about the cloud or whatever, they just want their documents and their presentations and their calendar and their music to just be there for them on every device they use.
So Apple built that. I don't think this is about presenting the idea differently, I think it's about actually doing the idea differently.
I go back to Joel Spolsky: When talking about Architects, he said: Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.
Remember that? Apple does, because with the iTunes Music Store, people could type the name of a song and listen to it right away, and Apple has made billions of dollars making that work simply and easily.
I agree that Microsoft execs probably think they already do product X or Y or Z that Apple is doing, but I don't think they do X or Y or Z the way Apple does them: I think Apple does them right much more often than Microsoft does.
There is more than just market/customer timing. It comes down to available components. Li-poly battery tech + cheap lightweight capacitive display + available 3G radios and networks also heavily contributed to the success of iPad.
Of course, but again, that doesn't explain why other tablets are failing today. Motorola's Xoom contains those same parts, yet its sales are terrible. Because it sucks.
The Steve Jobs WWDC 1997 speech that was linked on here the other day - he was talking about his dream for the future, and mentioned that he doesn't want a hand writing computer with local storage like the Newton, he wants a screen and a keyboard which syncs to the network data stores where his data is.
iPad pretty much does that, at least for email and buying audio and video and apps from iTMS. Windows tablets didn't - they were local data, handwriting based, windowed Apps, like a movable desktop.
They didn't just fail because their spec was poor and their tech was early, they failed because they weren't a compelling thing to use, they were like an ordinary computer but worse.
No. The windows tablets that have been available since the 1990's were simply shit. They were simply a flat screen running windows with a pen. and that idea hasn't changed a bit since windows for pen computing in 1991. Same old windows+a pen interface, and it's absolutely horrible.
It wasn't timing, it was simply that Microsoft didn't get that a tablet was something different.
The problem is that a "flat screen running windows with a pen" was the pinacle of what could be brought to market at that time by anyone. Microsoft tried.
> The problem is that a "flat screen running windows with a pen" was the pinacle of what could be brought to market at that time by anyone. Microsoft tried.
The problem is that, if a "flat screen running windows with a pen" is a shitty experience that nobody in their right mind would buy, you're better off not bringing it to market.
Microsoft didn't earn a gold star for "trying"; they wrecked their brand by associating it with ten years of shitty tablet products nobody wanted.
Sometimes it's better to realize that if the tech doesn't exist to let you execute your product well, you're better off not harming your brand by executing it poorly.
Newton and Palm proved you could have a acerem-and-pen computer that didn't suck. It's just that Microsoft will never lauch anything that competes with Windows: they'll just graft the current fad on to of it
I agree that Microsoft execs probably think they already do product X or Y or Z that Apple is doing, but I don't think they do X or Y or Z the way Apple does them: I think Apple does them right much more often than Microsoft does.
Actually I don't think most MS execs think they build the same cloud product. I think they believe they have the feature set, but they realize, probably better than most, that they're not as well integrated. This is largely due to antitrust concerns.
MS has been hamstrung on doing deep integration for a lot of features. Live Mesh is a killer feature if built into Win7. As an optional download, no one ever even knows it exists.
With the rise of tablets and mobile phones as computers, they may finally begin to be able to start adding functionality typically seen in standalone apps to the OS (as they can argue they no longer have a monopoly in the personal computing space). Until they feel comfortable doing that they're going to continue to just have silo'ed apps that never get traction. And I think their execs know it.
How much of Microsoft's difficulty integrating things into Windows is a result of the anti-trust lawsuit they went through? People seem to forget that Microsoft went through 3 years of worrying that the government would break them up because they bundled a browser with Windows. That had to have changed how they felt about bundling new things into the OS. Or do people think it was long enough ago that the culture has moved on?
How much of Microsoft's difficulty integrating things into Windows is a result of the anti-trust lawsuit they went through?...Or do people think it was long enough ago that the culture has moved on?
There are some things where this is almost certainly the case, like antivirus. For some other things, some of it has to do with selling an OS and not the whole package.
But I do think the cloud is one area where they'd love to have tighter integration -- but will DropBox, Amazon, and Google protest if they do? That's something that Apple doesn't have to worry about at all -- they can tell these other companies to shove it -- we don't have a monopoly.
> People seem to forget that Microsoft went through 3 years of worrying that the government would break them up because they bundled a browser with Windows.
I think that's a pretty large oversimplification.
Microsoft didn't get in trouble just for bundling a browser; they got in trouble for bundling a browser and then using their position of market dominance to lock out competition, e.g., they used Windows licensing agreements to forbade OEMs from preinstalling competing browsers on systems. Microsoft's behavior went well beyond just bundling a browser.
Although the browser bundling is what people remember there was much more to it than that - just ask Be and Hitachi. At the time the consensus was that Microsoft got off lightly after being found guilty of abuse (although the EU was much stricter).
But yes - it takes generations to change a corporate culture, so it may only just starting to change.
I think the point was about non-obvious features. Lets take the Aero snap feature in Windows 7. How many would know that it is possible to drag a window to the sides and the top etc. and have it snap into place for split screen view or to maximize? Most of the people who know would be either geeks, or someone who saw someone else do it or discovered it by accident.
Contrast that to Apple's features, which are demoed in keynotes by Jobs and watched by a BIG percentage of Apple users. This is the reason that Apple is an ultra secret company with very high penalties for leaking things out. The hype that precedes every conference, with all the guessing etc. keeps Apple in the headlines and in people's minds. That's what people mean when they say Apple is a marketing company. Contrast that to Microsoft, how many people would watch them tout new features? They do make good stuff, but without their marketing, sales would be a lot slower.
Did you see the SkyDrive features at the MS event? No. Actually neither did I. In fact it wasn't in the recent MS events. In fact it was announced with with a blog entry:
Why didn't MS talk about this at their special Mango VIP event? No idea. MS seems to think that getting too much attention for features is a bad thing.
I agree. It appears that turn by turn navigation (via Bing Maps) is also coming in the Mango update and if so, it would be a really big differentiator (only Android has it thus far) for their platform. Not a peep during their event.
--
John Gruber recently critiqued the Windows 8 preview video that was uploaded to youtube.
It looked like a high school project. I doubt Apple would ever preview their OS with such a poorly produced video.
>It looked like a high school project. I doubt Apple would ever preview their OS with such a poorly produced video.
I think it's pretty good and clean. The iPad UI looks like a scaled down version of OS X in 2001 compared to that now and I've heard the same sentiment from many other people.
Metro looks like that to new people but is very functional once you start using it. Here is a good primer on it.
Whoever shot that video had no idea what they were doing. Get a lav mike or boom mike, for a start, so that your primary narration track doesn't pick up all the reverb from the room. It was definitely amateurish - not only would Apple not do such a crappy job, I doubt most startups would, either.
You can have an outsourced service make a demo video with proper voiceover for less than $1,000. That video from Microsoft is just sloppy, not frugal or homespun.
My wife is a nurse. She has no real interest in technology, though she loves her iPhone. When a new iPhone or new major version of iOS comes out she always asks me about because all her nursey mates on the ward chat about it.
Agreed. A fellow co-worker, who doesn't even have an iPhone, loves watching Steve Jobs present keynotes due to his presentation style and they way he/apple demo's new technology. While she may be a producer in a digital agency she is certainly not tech savvy and not trying to keep up with the latest apple news.
Definitely not, I know loads of people who are happy Apple users but by no definition geeks, and they watch it. Just because they want to know what way the platform is going they're using.
Thats not true about Google. They consistently develop products that address needs I didn't even know I had: Chrome, Docs, Maps, all the way back to gmail. Hell, their business is based on search, which embodies this concept.
The bottom line is that Apple knows how to sell products to consumers, and Microsoft doesn't
I disagree. Apple isn't selling a product to consumers, they're telling consumers, "Hey guys, by the way, Apple stuff just got a lot better. You're going to like the new way it works. Come check it out." iCloud is "the new way to store and access your content."
Apple knows they're in the business of selling Apple stuff, and iCloud is an improvement to that stuff rather than something separate. The fact that iCloud is a "product" is incidental and only matters to people who are used to thinking in those terms: stock analysts, MBA school marketers, shareholders, etc. To consumers, needing another "product" to do exactly the same things they've always been doing is a nuisance. Another complication? Fuck that. I like what I've got. I don't need them ramming another product down my throat. Apple's on their wavelength: they just want people to keep using Apple products and they want more people to switch. This is all about making existing products work better. Honestly, it would be more attractive to consumers if the this new non-product had no name at all, but Apple had to cater a little bit to all the journalists and analysts and bloggers who need a product name so they can talk about it. So Apple gave it a name that isn't catchy and only means something to people who follow technology trends.
I don't think Microsoft's slowness is just incompetence, though. There's also an issue of trust. Microsoft can't just roll out a cloud service and a whole bunch of cloud-enabled software to desktop users and expect them to use it. Who would trust Microsoft? Apple is just a company and shouldn't be considered trustworthy from a consumer's point of view, but it is regarded with trust and affection by a large number of users. Besides, if jack-booted thugs arrived on my doorstep as a result of something I stored in Apple's iCloud, it would probably be the Fashion Police coming to take me to a gulag for frumpy people (which I'm convinced is Apple's intended endgame.) Not only is Microsoft trusted less by its users, Microsoft wants enterprise customers as much as or more than individual consumers, and the number of businesses who won't trust Microsoft because they see themselves in competition with Microsoft or its business partners (or in violation of Microsoft software licensing terms) is pretty big. Microsoft needs a more complicated solution with better security and probably a productized cloud storage platform so users can manage their own cloud servers if they don't trust Microsoft. Apple is concentrating on consumers and has a loyal customer base that is willing to trust them with storage, so it's no wonder they've found it easier to make the jump.
You're right, every Apple customer watches hours of keynotes before purchasing the device. It's not Steve Job's explanation that makes them so understandable. The device itself explains its own purpose better than any other device.
> I don't know that anything Apple is doing is that revolutionary
Apple is proof that there is a very fine line between good and great but it's hard to make something good great. Apple has a long history (now) of taking things that suck and making them not suck. How do you define revolutionary?
> the difference is that Apple and Jobs are phenomenal at presenting the idea so that people actually get it.
Marketing people will tell you that good marketing sells products. They have a vested interest in fermenting this view. The truth is simpler: good products sell themselves. Marketing just helps.
The real success of Apple isn't in the success of their market (although their ads are really quite brilliant generally speaking), it's that their products are simple enough TO get.
> The bottom line is that Apple knows how to sell products to consumers
Apple is a consumer hardware company. That's all they really do and care about and it shows.
Microsoft is an OEM and enterprise Windows and Office license selling company and it shows.
Apple can (and did) change their desktop OS to make the best experience possible. In Microsoft there would be a turf war (particularly with Ballmer at the helm, given his history) to make sure that any new product somehow pushes the Windows agenda. A new OS? No way that'll happen.
It's not about marketing, it's about singularity of purpose. The guy with one goal is more often than not going to do better at achieving that goal than the guy with that goal and another one.
1) I think you underestimate how much good old fashioned engineering goes into Apple products. Clunky versus seamless is a major substantive benefit for the customer, and it takes a lot of engineering to get there.
2) Being good at sales also yields benefits. Customers benefit substantively when there is a big ecosystem around a solution.
The iPhone is the perfect example. The iPhone UI works because it's FLUID. The lack of lag and the responsiveness is the difference between feeling like you're operating a computer an feeling like you're manipulating something real. That took engineering. They needed a responsive touchscreen, hardware accelerated UI stack, etc, to get that effect. Did other people have capacitive touchscreens and hardware acceleration before? Who knows, what's clear is Apple was the first one to engineer a complete solution.
It's not about marketing, Apple is brilliant in making a feature easy and discoverable.
On spot comment. Cloud file storage and auto replication, file and document automatic sync,Web versions of office. Msft has that. You can even extend sync through API's.
Features are there, but seems like nobody knows about it, discoverability is lacking.
You know, the funny thing is that as nerds we tend to look at iCloud and say, "well I can already do that with Dropbox and Amazon Cloud Player". It's not revolutionary to us.
Yet, can you imagine how many sales Apple will be able to take from Microsoft just by saying, "all your files are backed up and synced automatically between your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Mac devices." No more worrying about backups, losing your photos, or losing your music.
Up until now GeekSquad and other computer repair businesses made a killing just on moving files between machines when you replace them or recovering lost files.
Apple is getting this right because it helps them sell more devices. Microsoft is getting it wrong because it would cost them a lot and wouldn't sell more copies of Windows or Office.
Actually, they were very careful to never use the word 'sync'. You don't "sync" anything, the files are just there, on all your devices, always up to date.
Then if it takes off, Microsoft will be locked into a competitor's platform. If someone's using Windows + iCloud, what's to keep them from switching to the (presumably better, more integrated) Mac + iCloud?
Price, converting all their Windows programs to Mac versions (or finding an equivalent), and the fact that they may not want a Mac. People I talk to own a PC because Apple doesn't offer the choices they want in a computer.
Good god! Isn't it too early to prejudge iCloud? It will likely get a lot of users (it's mostly free and automatically integrated into their products after all), and it will likely succeed given mobility trends. But it is also too early to judge the future success or failure of Microsoft's cloud offering (though from what I'm seeing now, I guess it is likely to succeed as well).
At this point in time, Apple's success in the "software+cloud" model is the same as that of Microsoft (in that neither have seen mass wide adoption).
The use of "humiliation" in the title is an obvious exaggeration. But I guess without such title, that article wouldn't end up on the front page of HN.
It'll get a lot of users because a lot of people own iDevices. The product can completely suck and people will still use it because it's Apple and unlike MobileMe, it's free. Microsoft doesn't understand the cult following that Apple has.
Apple is far bigger than their cult following. If you attribute their success to the cult you are only fooling yourself. A cult alone doesn't buy 200,000,000+ iOS devices.
People generally do not use Apple products that suck, not everything they do takes off. They are just vocal about things that take off and very quiet on the rest, e.g. dismissing AppleTV as a "hobby" even though they clearly want it to take off.
You can attribute Apple's success to marketing, cult, whatever you want but at the end of the day Apple makes good products and puts a lot of care into them, and that's why they sell.
They do put a lot of care into their products, but their cult following does seem to play an important part in protecting their image. There's another thread on the front page of HN where people are describing how their Apple laptop power adapters burst into flames.
I am typing this on an iPad that periodically loses its wifi connection. Googling the problem yields dozens of complaints about this issue. Apple supporters on these forums blame wifi routers, even though the iPad is the only device with these issues.
I like the App Store, but, by default, I can't buy games on my iPad - why? Because I live in South Africa, and unlike every other device manufacturer with an app store here Apple hasn't applied for self rating games, which, according to most sources, is a straightforward process. Again, Apple and its supporters don't bother mentioning this little detail.
Apple does put a lot of care into their devices, but I also think there is a tendency to deny issues, to brush them over and to rely on the cult to impart an aura of invincibility.
Apple is not invincible, look at the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco.
I agree that it's bad that they deny most problems instead of being transparent about them. It can be extremely frustrating, you file a Radar ticket and then it goes into a black hole and the only feedback you might get is that someone else had the problem too. They are by no means perfect and neither are their products, I didn't mean to imply anything like that.
I disagree. Web apps are ubiquitous and people know how they work. Google doesn't do keynotes to announce that Gmail autosaves to the cloud... of course it does. Everyone has that expectation of web apps.
Microsoft got a lot of criticism for Windows 7 touch capabilities for taking something designed for mouse input and adding touch on top. It wasn't designed for that. I think that's exactly what Apple is doing here with iCloud. They are taking something that was designed for local access (native applications) and are attempting to shoehorn cloud into it.
iCloud will never work as seamlessly as a web application. Consumers will not be fooled. You can't go to your friends house and edit a document stored in iCloud. You can't pull up a Word document at the library. But you can access your Facebook account. You can open a spreadsheet in Office Web Apps.
Apple is selling iCloud because they have to. Customer perception is not on their side on this one, finally. It's a very tough sell. 1) You have to commit to the complete Apple ecosystem. 2) You have to give up the ability to access your files anywhere. My guess is that most common consumers will not fully embrace iCloud. I don't expect it to be the same type of runaway success that iTunes and iPhone were. Rather it is more likely to be a moderate success: something people use when it's convenient but not something people change their habits to accommodate.
Web apps became popular because the desktop was too unwieldy for the average person to deal with. The browser was easy to deal with in comparison. The situation with iOS is completely different. The main advantage that web apps have is sharing and collaboration but that is easier to accomplish than a web app being as smooth and looking native to the average user.
The main advantage of web apps is ubiquity and ease. The former is of extreme importance when it comes to the cloud. If a user has to think about whether they can access a document at a later time, the cloud is failing them. If iCloud is to succeed it has to convince consumers that ubiquity is not that important. That's a huge thing to overcome and I feel it is being brushed aside in these iCloud praising articles.
This reminds me of when Microsoft was hyping touch user interface features in the run-up to the Windows 7 launch (without anything tangible in the field). Then Apple released multi-touch gesture pads on their laptops and furthered the reach of iOS.
MS has been humiliated by Apple for over a decade now. Bill Gates wrote an entire book about the home of the future. And how digital devices would rule it. Who came across and actually did that? iPod, iPhone, iPad and the AppleTV are all very successful and the "digital hub" is basically the same thing that MS has been saying.
MS has been doing a lot of catch-up "also-ran" devices trying to do what Apple has done. It's unfortunate that they could never leverage their huge lead to make it happen.
Microsoft need to do more of what they did with XBox - spin off a smaller, more agile brand that doesn't invoke the image of dusty CRT monitors and lumbering corporate IT.
Apple's brand identity works for selling consumer products, but nobody really finds value in the fact that their music player or phone was branded Microsoft. Their brand's strength isn't in consumer tech.
Apple didn't manage this by standing still, either. Their brand used to be Apple Computer, and their logo was a cheesy rainbow. That doesn't cut it with 21st century consumers, so they redrew their image.
Branding is a relatively small issue. The bigger problem is that Microsoft's products simply don't "just work" as digital hub solutions. You can make them work if you want to muck around with home groups, addresses prefixed with //, domains, confusing file ACLs, and "shares". But it takes a lot more effort than just putting in your iTunes username and password, which is how you hook up your Apple devices.
The downvotes are coming from . . . people who think setting up MS home sharing is easy? (Maybe people who have never done it -- I have.) Or people who genuinely believe branding is more important than the product being branded? I have no use for either of these perspectives but I am curious.
I'd argue that, through failure to gain consumer traction, Microsoft just haven't been able to create the network of tightly related devices that Apple has. Thanks to their consumer focus, Apple have an entire platform sharing the same operating system, individual devices developed somewhat in harmony. Microsoft, attempting to corner several markets separately, has competing teams working on entirely unrelated products whose connectedness is incidental.
There was a Steve Jobs keynote from the 1990s posted the other day in which he outlined his vision of a networked device ecosystem. It is very significant that they built the line of devices before they tried to market the backbone. Microsoft was thinking about this concept for just as long, but they never really had the platform.
Edit: To reply, the key is that product follows from brand and marketing. The reason Apple's products are connected so well is that they're all targeted at one market. Microsoft target several, so their products are developed in bubbles.
Edit: To reply again, I think we may be arguing the same thing, but our disagreement is in the reasoning. I believe that Microsoft's lack of a coherent product is due to an attempt to sell their vision to several markets at once; it makes connecting the dots very difficult. Apple's (assumed) success lies in their coherent targeting of a single market, through their strong consumer brand. Both of them are selling a vision; Apple get to amplify this by designing products that fit with their brand.
It's a shame we can't continue this conversation further due to the weird commenting system.
Right. Like I said, the problem is not branding but that Microsoft's products do not play well together like Apple's TV box, speakers, wifi base stations, automatic backup devices, phones, computers, and music players, all of which hook up to each other basically automatically (all you have to do is enter your iTunes account info).
To reply to your edit: I think that brand and marketing come from product. You cannot market a feature that does not exist, nor can your brand gain a reputation for an attribute that your products do not have. But underneath, product, brand, and marketing all stem from vision and priorities. Apple and MS shared the same vision, but Apple made this part of that vision a priority. Therefore their products reflect it, their brand gains a reputation for it, and their marketing can highlight the features that support the vision. Microsoft made this part of their vision a talking point, thus their products don't reflect it, their brand lacks the reputation, and any marketing that tries to highlight connectedness of devices rings hollow.
You can always reply to a comment by clicking "link" above the comment, then replying. (At least, that works for me when I don't see a "reply" link below a comment.)
The problem with Windows home sharing isn't that it's hard to do. But that it's not a good idea. I don't want content to rely upon my laptop downstairs not being in hibernate.
The cloud or syncing are the way to share content. Not by sharing actual live content on laptops.
I admit that it's often not a good idea, but I have found that pushing movies on my computer to my Apple TV has some use cases and has been relatively painless.
>> All of the cloud computing services Google offers to consumers, like email, word processing and spreadsheets, happen within the browser.
Factually, this is incorrect. All of the services are available within the browser, but there have been native mobile apps available for gmail/docs/calendar for quite some time now.
I feel that if Microsoft had taken Bill Gates' book "The Road Ahead" and implemented a lot of the ideas in the book they could have preempted Apple and Google by several years! What's amazing to me is that the book is over 15 years old and just now a lot of what he mentioned in there with respect to the cloud is being implemented. Not by his company but Apple.
Microsoft does poor advertising. Office 2011 has a pretty sick cloud integration although you need to be running windows to use it properly. http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive Skydrive. And Office 365 is even further along apparently although I am not a Beta user. I would argue M$FT is ahead of both apple and google, if you run windows and have a win7 phone your integration is pretty insane at this point, toss in an xbox + live and everything is integrated really well. It's just not so cool to talk M$FT as it isn't as shiny. I have a Mac now and have for 6 years, for the 4 years before that I went to a high school with all macs, just trying to point out I am not biased. People just seem to want to love apple and hate msft and as a user of both I don't get why other than "apple's cool."
On a similar note, many people buy macs because they "don't have viruses" which has to do with market share not that they aren't vulnerable as we all know. Am I the only one who believes the Mac App Store is just the beginning of them closing off the system so that in the case they reach a substantial market share they can avoid virus control by making sure you download directly from them? If M$FT told dev's you can only put software on our machines if you give us 30% ppl would go nuts.
Just saying, the fanboyism keeps many users from being critical, in the end they are a company, question every move they make as with google and M$FT.
The problem for Microsoft is that they continue to serve two masters: consumer users and corporate users. Corporate IT shops, especially within certain industries, can be exceptionally wary of anything that moves data outside their walls. Consumers are in general not nearly so picky. Corporations are MS's biggest customers and for years have had considerable influence on product direction. It's just not in Microsoft's DNA to ruffle the corporate customer feathers too much (whereas I get the sense Google and Apple almost take pleasure in it).
The biggest issue for MS isn't just that iCloud might be an embarrassment. It's a full on attack on the Windows monopoly. Apple telegraphed this in the WWDC presentation when they showed the stats on the numbers of people who don't own a personal computer (either Mac or Windows) in different countries around the world. The combination of iCloud + iPad means that the iPad can be a standalone device. This could potentially be huge in markets like China. How many SharePoint licenses does MS have to sell to make up for ceding a significant portion of the untapped Chinese PC market to the iPad?
I think there's a huge opportunity here, that Microsoft is trying to enter with their "Private Cloud" advertising, for the Software plus Services model that runs against servers you own or lease. Sold properly, that could work very well with corporate clients - "Here, your employees can enjoy transparent sync, always-available-anywhere access, with all data stored securely on your servers."
HP is also aiming for that same private-cloud target, building that with operating systems including Windows, WebOS, Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS and others, with "cloud-mapped" applications from HP and partners, with the rack-n-stack hardware and networking gear (of course), the management tools that they've built and bought, a veritable blizzard of marketing buzz-phrases, and with the usual aggregation of other pieces and parts, as well as offering the softwarte and hardware (and cloud) services to keep it going.
It seems to me that, if Apple so desired, they could make a fair bit of money selling a 'private iCloud' service to companies looking to incorporate iPhones and iPads into their infrastructure in a big way. In the same way companies can set up their own BES server to provide in-house management of their data, the ability to set up an in-house iCloud server, to back up their employees' documents, data, settings, etc., as well as 'find my iPhone', distribute out custom books (e.g. corporate training documents, procedures, forms, manuals, etc.), and in-house apps, could be very appealing to a lot of companies.
I'm sure Apple's considered it, but I doubt they see enough of a market in the product to bother packaging it up and selling it. It's obvious that they're not incredibly interested in the server or high-end enterprise market, and they're perfectly content to let their Activesync integration carry them for now.
Apple have been going at a clip these past few years creating, scaling and tweaking a few massive products - ipods, itunes, iphone & ipads while outpacing competition with macs and still carrying a few fizzles (apple servers, apple tv...) and a few lower visibility but fairly important products (iwork, ilife..).
I think they just don't have the capacity to do more big things right now. When/if iOS gets put on medium heat like OSX is/was, then maybe we they'll try this. It's not really much harm waiting a few years to see if/how some of the newer Apple stuff (iOS, icloud) and its competition gets used by large companies.
I would be that guy who says "Who on a non-Mac platform would bother using this?" but then six months down the line we'll find out that Apple has some secret plan to port it and appeal to Windows-using iPhone/iPad owners and boy my face would be red.
Microsoft have released some great products in the last few years; Xbox and Windows Phone are a couple. Xbox has obviously done extremely well and WP is only going to grow with their partnership with Nokia. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these were both the result of starting from scratch with a smaller, more agile team who have permission to do something different and new. This works; even for Microsoft.
I also feel that maybe similar to Marco Arment's comments on the benefits of the new features in iOS on Instapaper, this may be the case for MSFT. If Apple can pave the way to making consumers' understand or at least appreciate what the cloud can do for them, then Microsoft and Google and others will have an easier time talking about their products. Before the iPhone came out, people couldn't see why and didn't want a "smartphone". Now everyone wants one, whether it's an iPhone or Android (and in the next few years Microsoft).
Microsoft does have some great products in this sphere I believe, Mesh and Skydrive being two. I haven't used either, but from what I've heard they do have some great potential. If off the back of Apple's announcement they can make them look good and continue developing on them, they will be able to sell it, even if its just by saying its the same as iCloud, but made by us. Apple does have a reputation of creating beautiful, easy to use products, but they are also seen as expensive and sometimes unneccessary. Android has taken off by being an alternative - Microsoft have the potential to be that alternative to iCloud. They have the pieces and experience shows MSFT does much better when they are the underdogs (Xbox and WP).
My girlfriend's first reaction to "iCloud" was "Is Mobile Me free now?". Its indeed fascinating to watch , a branding exercise & marketing effort doing it's job with the media & the bloggers to sell an under used platform with a bad rep.
The only thing, as an Android user, I drool over is the ability of iCloud users to have their music "uploaded" for free (without transferring any data). I signed up for the Google Music beta, and 20 minutes later deleted my account. Why? It was going to take several weeks to upload my 60GB of music, during which time I wouldn't be able to seed my torrents as easily. And, saturating my upstream kills my downstream bandwidth.
Sounds like your network is suffering from http://www.bufferbloat.net/ .If your OS supports traffic shaping, you can probably fix this by limiting the upload speed there to a fraction under your actual bandwidth. E.g in Linux by using the tc command.
Does anyone else feel like the cheers of success for iCloud are a little premature? It's amazing that since it's Apple we automatically believe the "No, really I mean it this time!". Shouldn't previous performance be taken into consideration (.Mac, MobileMe)? Boy who cries cloud?
Until iCloud is launched (not til the fall), all we have is old broken promises, vapourware, and some very expensive data centres.
I want iCloud to live up to the hype as much as anyone. But at this point the only thing we should be calling a success is the awesome power of the Jobs Distortion Field. He's the tech equivalent of a superstar athlete in their prime and the top of their game - evidenced by articles like these.
Actually, the cost is your click habits. Google is all about getting advertisers to sign on by saying "we have better information on all these people because we house all their data." If you are comfortable with that, that's fine.
Personally, I like Apple's (and for the most part Microsoft) "we don't give a shit about you unless you pay us money." When I stop paying them, I don't have to worry about them keeping any of my data. When I stop using Google products do I have the same guarantee? This is the same argument I use against Facebook.
I think you're making an assumption that Apple and MS don't track your click habits, as you put it, in addition to charging you for it. Is there really a guarantee from Apple/MS that once you stop paying them they won't keep your data?
At least Google is sorta-kinda upfront that they're doing it.
How exactly do I get this beta? I have tried, updated iTunes and my iPhone, but see nothing. Do I need iOS5 to be able to use it, which I would need a developer account to get access to?
10.3 should work. Go to the Preferences, then Store, and select Automatic Downloads for Music/Apps/Books. Also, you can go to the Apple Store and under Quick Links, you'll find a Purchased link. That'll let you re-download any Music/Apps/Books. It's not really cloud-y yet, but it's a start.
I agree completely. People forget about Apple's failures very quickly and continuously bring up Google's for some reason. Apple makes a lot of great products but they have as many duds as everyone. In the last year and half they've had at least 3 off the top of my head: Ping, GameCenter, and iBookstore. iBookstore isn't a total failure but it's not most users first, second, and sometimes even third choice. It was widely speculated to be a Kindle killer, but that hasn't been the case at all.
I'd also point out that Apple is entering a market that it has traditionally not done well in and is pushing an unnatural definition of cloud that consumers will be forced to either accept or reject.
You are thinking about yourself as a skilled technical person, not the general consumer of Apple products. The whole "it just works" marketing statement from Apple is key.
You and I will continue to use DropBox, Flickr, rsync, tar, scp, Aperture, svn, Eclipse, and jailbroken iPhones.
The other 95% of Apple's customers will relish the fact that all the sudden, for free, they can take a picture on their iPhone, show it to their friend on their iPad, and then show it to the entire family on their AppleTV without having to do anything but take the picture.
And you can bet that Apple learned their lessons with MobileMe.
Basically, Apple is betting the farm on providing a private back-end infrastructure that front ends all of their products. It is certainly a gamble and fraught with land-mines, but if they pull it off it will serve to take away additional market share from Google and the other big OS/Mobile companies.
1) I don't use any of those services you assume I use because we both frequent the same website.
2) 95% of Apple's customers don't have an iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV (or a Mac). In fact, I would wager than the number of Apple customers who have more than 1 Apple product is south of 40%, the number with more than 2 south of 20%. Those who are entirely sold into the ecosystem, an extreme minority. Those people, the ones who might stand to gain from this service are the oddballs.
There's nothing wrong with MobileMe or .Mac (they both have bad names -- thats the biggest issue)
They weren't huge sweeping successes because they didn't have enough features and cost a LOT. But the features they did have worked well.
MobileMe was just .Mac rebranded with more features.
iCloud is just MobileMe rebranded with more features.
Apple is smart for recognizing when they need to rebrand for communication facilitation. But don't be fooled. iCloud is just MobileMe with a facelift a few new features.
There was, at launch - they were terrible, didn't work properly, had a ton of downtime, etc. It got a reputation for being a slow, useless, unreliable service, and while the service got much better (I've been using it almost since its inception), its reputation never truly recovered.
That does not solve the problem, as devices can go offline. If they come back with a change from an old version you still have to deal with a conflict.
I've been using MobileMe since it launched and, besides the initial problems, it's actually a really good service. It's the $99 price tag that doomed it to be a niche service. With iCloud being free, even if it's only as functionality as MM, it will probably be successful. Also, historically, Apple is pretty good at saying a product or service is going to do this or that and delivering on it. MobileMe does pretty much exactly what it promises to do. iCloud integration with iOS devices is working out pretty well in the beta so far. The only real question mark at this point is what iCloud.com is going to look like. I do think Apple needs to have a pretty strong web app offering to compliment the iOS/Mac integration.
All the standard stuff works without a hitch – exactly like MobileMe. MobileMe was never bad (except for iDisk which has always been slow for some reason), it was actually pretty great – but it cost money. That was its problem, not performance.
Mail, calendar, address book, bookmarks, iPad backup – all of that works without a hitch for me and it is fast. If the more important parts (documents API) work the same then I foresee no problems.
Once again, the big difference is price and the documents API, not performance. Sometimes that’s enough to make all the difference.
Through their own efforts, Microsoft means Office, which means corporate. Unsurprisingly, their best consumer success is only tangentially associated with their name. "Microsoft Xbox" sounds like "Accounting Bouncy-house" to most people. There's a little bit of a dissonance when you remember that, yeah, Microsoft made this game system.
Even Windows, which is used by a majority of consumers today, feels like using a work tool at home, rather than something more personal. The way it communicates with you is like a colleague, not a friend. There are features that are the same as equivalent features on other operating systems, sometimes better, sometimes worse. But they are designed to make you "more productive", not to help you. Even when the mechanism is the same, it feels off as a personal device...
So, it's unsurprising that M advertises the Cloud heavily and it just feels like a "team-building" video, whereas A takes advantage of M's "to the cloud" ads building awareness to do a small press push and a brief description in a presentation and it's perceived as the second-coming.
And here's the thing, the "to the cloud" idea as marketing is a great idea! It's funny, and totally memorable -- but the Microsoft brand just kills it dead.
Also "From the makers of Internet Explorer" doesn't exactly have a nice ring to it. Microsoft has a bad track record in exactly the areas that "the cloud" is supposed to fix (security, stability, backups, crash-free, virus-free, maintenance-free, "it just works"). Their PR team has a big job ahead of them.
They're now doing a lot better now -- and have been for a few years, it seems.
People love Windows7 and the virus/security thing is now no longer cool to say. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is widely proclaimed as one of the best security apps available -- recently there was a thread on Reddit asking for 'Must have free apps' and seemingly every second person was suggesting MSE. In regards to maintenance, registry cleaners, defraggers and the like all seem to be fading away from our view. Like with security, speaking of 'BSODs' has dramatically died down and Win7 is not known for stability issues.
The big problem I have with the "to the cloud" ads is that there's no real call to action, just a vague message that this "cloud" thing seems neat.
It shows you a bunch of features under the vague branding of "Windows Live" and "The Cloud", but it's not really clear what you're supposed to buy or download to get them. Are you supposed to run out and buy one of those touch-screen desktops they're showing off to get the features? Is Windows Live a thing you buy in store? Are these features actually already in Windows 7, and if so, in which apps?
As a techie I'm aware of the distinctions between Windows, Windows Live, the Cloud, and the touch screen computers that feature prominently in these ads, but most people aren't.
Apple is great at clearly getting across the idea that say, iCloud is baked into Lion and iOS 5, so be prepared to get those things to get all the benefits of the iCloud. They give you a simple name to hang all of the benefits they talk about on, a concrete way of obtaining said named item, and a date to expect to go and buy it.
Microsoft, in contrast, can't seem to clearly articulate to people how to get the benefits they are being shown.
Yes. It seems that at some level, the degree of innovation is often similar and the difference between Apple and Microsoft is more a matter of design (which in my opinion is no small factor) and marketing than anything else.
Everyone knows of the XBox, but almost no one thinks of it as the 'Microsoft XBox'. The only brand they're helping there is the XBox brand, not the Microsoft brand.
Average families that don't want Office? Any of them with a Mac. iWork is cheaper, integrates better, and is generally easy to use, plus the templates are much nicer. For the 99% of people who use 1% of Office's features, iWork is more than 'good enough', it's 'much better'.
Windows 7 was a success because Vista was junk and XP is ten years old and showing its age. It's a good OS, but people are buying it because XP just isn't good enough anymore and it's Windows 7 or Mac OS X.
Microsoft's brand is hurting because they don't have a cohesive strategy for the things they do. They've launched two separate mobile phone platforms in the last few years; one of which was cancelled almost immediately after launch, and the other, while extremely promising, is floundering in the market so far.
Microsoft needs serious top-down leadership, not middle-outwards leadership, and until they get that, their brand is going to continue to suffer.
I have to agree with the Chronicle's basic point which is that Microsoft has talked about "cloud computing" for a long time and not delivered anything. Even a bad anything.
Its a very good example of the Innovator's Dilemma [1] in action, you've got some smart folks who see a future problem, and start creating interesting technology and vision around that problem, and then the reality that the company doesn't "need" it now gets in the way of pushing it from concept into the product stream. So it never gets to the 'commit' point where everyone is on board with shipping it to customers and trying to support it.
Why? Because that is "risky" but just tweaking the current product stream and adding a few features or targeting an adjacent market is much lower "risk."
As Clayton points out in his book innovation always loses in the 'risk' evaluation. So companies that are 'managed' always strive for optimum returns, and since you can't predict the future they are risk averse. Companies that are 'lead' on the other hand have the capability to ignore the risk in order to get to the rewards on the other side.
Startups have the risk meter pegged so it doesn't enter into their management decisions, instead they are focussed on execution and they flame out or succeed as they will and when they succeed they clarify the risk around their idea (if it flops the managers can pat themselves on the back for avoiding that land mine, if it takes off the managers wring their hands and wonder if they should have been able to forecast that success.
I think Apple may have combined some protocols and services into a useful adjunct to their product strategy. We won't really know until later when we see how it fairs. From the presentations and markitecture that Microsoft has espoused it seems like they could have done something similar but they didn't. It does reflect badly on how they are being managed, and that buck does stop at Ballmer. So it will be interesting to see how this affects his future there.
I agree. It is the lack of cohesion that is killing them in the 'cloud'. Not just in the sense that there isn't a unified UX for all their stuff (though that is also true), but they are so non-unified that they often have multiple products that do the same basic things, causing end-user confusion and quite simply too many choices. [eg. Sync, Live Mesh, SkyDrive... which is right for 'me' if I'm a non-techie and don't understand the subtle differences in each? Who knows... I'll just use Dropbox!]
(FWIW I'm a big fan of Windows Live Mesh, but I've known more than a handful of non-techies who were just confused by it when I suggested it due to the related-but-different products that pop up when they are trying to learn more about it).
This does seem to be a problem they are aware of given the unification work they've done with the products I used as an example, but they still have a very long way to go on this.
Ironically, the cohesion has little to do with technical knowhow or marketing. Microsoft effectively lost a decade due to their anti-competitive practices and maneuvering in the late 90s. They were maneuvering to unify the desktop/Internet and easily could have.
Instead, the penalties resulted in a lot of backtracking and some very cautious positioning that cost them the competitive edge while tiptoeing through the legalese.
In all of those things I see a "me too!" response to some other product.
Windows Live <-> Gmail services
Azure <-> Amazon AWS / Google AppServ
Sharepoint <-> DropBox / Google {Docs|Groups}
Hotmail <-> Gmail
MSN Music <-> iTunes
But what the Chronicle was pointing out (and others here) is that the iCloud stuff is (if Jobs is accurate) the 'rest' of your UX experience with everything in their product line. For me its the difference between telling all your developers "You can assume that iCloud will be attached to this device" and "add #ifdef (some optional service) other feature."
One is point responses to specific offerings through network services, and the other is retooling your architecture and baking in network connectivity.
Googe Maps vs Streets and Trips was always one of those things, Maps doesn't work if you're not connected to the Internet, S&T does because of its builtin database. As that decision relates to customer facing issues, in the Google case your map is always (nearly) current, in the S&T case you may not know that the freeway extension was completed last year. But Google loses when you can't connect you get slow (Edge) or no maps on your phone, but not a problem for S&T. Google 'bakes in' the assumption that you're on the network.
"Delivering on the vision" requires a vision to exist and be articulated, and then to outline a roadmap of deliverables between now and the time you feel like the vision is 'delivered.' To my way of looking at things that is where Microsoft could do much much better than they have.
[update: fair point on sharepoint, I admit I didn't know it existed until it was offered as an alternative to what Google had to offer. I'm guessing that it was very enterprise targeted early on. ]
Of course, Sharepoint was released a decade before Dropbox.
And Hotmail a decade before Gmail. (nearly.)
And the web versions of Office are certainly more functional (tho arguably less usable) than Gdocs -- especially when Office Live launched and you still, at the time, couldn't do Find and Replace in a Google Document without seeing several "EXPERIMENTAL!" warnings all over it.
And something the GP didn't mention, but that can be added to his list, is that Microsoft invented ajax when it released the XHR object feature to enable web-based outlook.
Though, sure, Ajax-like behavior was possible (tho not popular and very clunky -- i know first hand) using iFrames. But come to think of it, I think Microsoft invented iFrames, too...
Thanks for the link, 1997 &2000, eh? No wonder my recollection is so vague...
I notice the article mentions "various unix Systems" then goes on to talk exclusively of the FreeBSD web front end. I still have vague (perhaps 12 year old) memories aout the actual mail storage and management being Sun kit... (mostly from the point of view of a bunch of friends who worked at Sun being outrageously amused at the ballsup of multiple attempts at migration...)
They used to have a migration PDF that detailed how their mail store was on FreeBSd for the backend, insofar as I can remember. It was possible that there was a mix of Sun technologies in the back.
There is no comparison: Sharepoint is not a me too product. SharePoint was Microsoft's fastest Billion, yes Billion, dollar product. For you to throw that in is not logical.
How can any sane person say Microsoft has not delivered anything cloud computing related? That seems similar to saying the sun doesn't exist while staring at it.
Unless you're blind or have not been paying any attention to Microsoft for the past ~ > 4 years . .
Others have put forward [incomplete] lists of Microsoft's various 'cloud' services and I'll add one.
Microsoft Azure. Hell, wasn't there a story on the frontpage of HN a day or so ago that iCloud uses it? I haven't read much into it so it may be a rumour.
> "Microsoft Azure. Hell, wasn't there a story on the frontpage of HN a day or so ago that iCloud uses it?"
The moment someone like Apple starts running a MS-based stack... well, I'd stay inside for fear of airborne pigs.
Let's see - a company that is solidly 'nix (to the point where their own desktop OS is POSIX), who has zero track record of building anything using a MS stack, is suddenly going to use MS's cloud offering, despite there being as-good (more likely, better) 'nix based solutions?
Startups have the risk meter pegged so it doesn't enter into their management decisions, instead they are focussed on execution and they flame out or succeed as they will and when they succeed they clarify the risk around their idea (if it flops the managers can pat themselves on the back for avoiding that land mine, if it takes off the managers wring their hands and wonder if they should have been able to forecast that success.
Your profile says you work for Blekko, and in a senior enough position that I'm going to assume you're not naive enough to actually believe this. Startups are every bit as capable as risk aversion as BigCos, albeit for different reasons. At BigCos, it's sheer organizational inertia you have to deal with. At startups, you have the exact opposite problem: "We're so new and unestablished that we just can't afford to take that kind of risk".
This is a fair point. The risks around committing to market a product for which there has not (yet) been established that such a product can work, is the risk that start-ups take. They believe in their better mouse trap and generally see it through to production if they can.
Then there are other risks which everyone is afraid of, like the risk of running out of capital before you're done (perhaps exemplified as the risk of pivoting) and one that is more damning in start-ups the risk of not having enough capital after you release, and your idea fails, to do another idea. While failure is always a possibility, it always hurts.
I accept your premise that humans, in general, are afraid of risk.
Perhaps I should narrow my claim to specifically say that large companies are more afraid of 'new product' risk than companies that aren't currently shipping any products.
I've always felt (but have no direct knowledge of) that Microsoft's initial failure to capture any sort of tablet market was their fear of creating a "new product" that would compete with Windows. I used one of the early Toshiba tablet PCs and was always saddened by what looked like a lack of commitment on Microsoft's part to the notion of a tablet in its software stack. When I used an iPad for the first time I didn't feel like it was a less capable version of MacOS.
175 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadLarry Ellison is right, we've had the "cloud" forever -- the network is the cloud -- but I think there's a good fit for the term "cloud" in the user space. "Cloud" describes a user experience. It's something that laymen can latch on to and begin to identify with an experience. While it abstracts detail, it's useful for marketing. The user may think:
"When I access Google Apps from this computer, my environment and experience are exactly the same as it is on any other computer. This is cloud computing."
The same would would apply for iCloud. Any device registered under your account works interchangeably.
Operating in the cloud means interchangeability of some underlying component that users are used to having to think about. E.g., "Oh, I'm not at my computer, so I can't access that document."
As an industry, we should try to narrow our usage the term to refer to services that deliver a location and device agnostic view of the entire end-user experience.
"But Google’s vision is about software you run in a web browser. Apple’s is about native apps you run on devices. Apple is as committed to native apps — on the desktop, tablet, and handheld — as it has ever been."
http://daringfireball.net/2011/06/demoted
However, Windows 8 seems to be coming with a ton of integrated cloud features so I don't know about the humiliation part.I just don't see that their marketshare is affected more than 1% specifically due to the cloud services in Lion.
This difference is clearly visible in every fiber of marketing material from both companies. Apple marketing feels friendly and fresh, while Microsoft's tends to feel aggressive. Sometimes Microsoft attempts to copy Apple's marketing style, but it feels faked or superficial.
Don't underestimate company's 'soul'.
Apple has made its recent success off developing and marketing products that consumers want to buy and that make them happy to use (look at how many people by an iPod or iPhone and go on to become Mac owners.) Microsoft mostly makes it way off of enterprise sales and bundling with PCs. That's fine, but it doesn't tend to lead to a culture that creates products that end consumers get really juiced about.
There are numerous Microsoft products where I just shake my head and wonder why they don't publicize/market/tout it more.
OneNote is one example. PowerShell was, for a long while. And many other miscellaneous bits of software.
Using SkyDrive to augment your Office installation is great. Hopefully, they integrate it with Windows as a whole. I have a feeling though that when they think about that integration Microsoft wonders if the antitrust hammer will come down on them.
When Win8 is released, it will be the defacto standard inside Fortune 500s and that's all Microsoft really cares about.
I'm sure there are a lot of Microsoft execs right now that are saying "we already do that with product X" and pretty pissed off that they were never able to sell product X over 5 years the way Apple did in an hour.
The bottom line is that Apple knows how to sell products to consumers, and Microsoft doesn't. Microsoft and Google both suffer from the same disease, they try to sell a product, not address a need. They might be the same thing in the end, and Microsoft might have even gotten there first, but Apple really gets marketing.
Microsoft's cloud strategy is very good for their business. They will run many enterprise products in the cloud successfully (Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) that generate revenue. You just won't read about them in sfgate.
The iPhone, iPod, and especially the iPad represented a near-total re-conceptualization of the product in that space.
Jonathan Ive studied industrial design. Steven Sinofsky studied computer science.
Past success doesn't even imply future success, and past failure is even worse.
Good question. But from a user perspective MobileMe syncing already works very well. When I buy a new Mac or iOS device, I simply configure my MobileMe account and automatically have my contacts, calendars, notes, and on the Mac preferences, dock items, etc.
They could have made the synchronization functionality of MobileMe free, and slowly add the features announced for iCloud. But announcing it as a new product is a far smarter marketing move. iCloud has dominated deadlines for days now, and people see it as something different from MobileMe.
No desktop app that I'm aware of from Microsoft does that today out of the box, as the default action. Sure you can easily sync stuff with Dropbox or whatever Microsoft's product is, or you can do word processing in your browser with Google Docs - but it sounds like with iCloud that Apple will be the first to offer this type of syncing as the default, no-extra-steps-or-thinking option.
You will not need to even do that. It's autosaved. Coming to Lion next month.
Actually, Chrome and Nexus-branded Android phones are the only Google products that I've seen advertised, ever. Of their hundreds of products, those 2 are the only ones that they're trying to "sell". In fact, Wave was pretty much their only product that comes to mind that didn't address a need (or at least that was the public perception), hence its inevitable demise. The rest (Search, Gmail, Docs, Android, Chrome, etc) were all direct responses to problems that people had.
http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...
People want their stuff to just be there. People actually don't care about the cloud or whatever, they just want their documents and their presentations and their calendar and their music to just be there for them on every device they use.
So Apple built that. I don't think this is about presenting the idea differently, I think it's about actually doing the idea differently.
I go back to Joel Spolsky: When talking about Architects, he said: Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
Remember that? Apple does, because with the iTunes Music Store, people could type the name of a song and listen to it right away, and Apple has made billions of dollars making that work simply and easily.
I agree that Microsoft execs probably think they already do product X or Y or Z that Apple is doing, but I don't think they do X or Y or Z the way Apple does them: I think Apple does them right much more often than Microsoft does.
Prior to the introduction of the iPad, Microsoft and its partners had shipped lots of models of tablets for over a decade and they were all failures.
Then came the iPad. The iPad didn't succeed because Apple presented it well. It succeeded because unlike all of its predecessors it didn't suck.
No. Those products were terrible, horrible, awful products, that's why they failed.
The timing for tablets is evidently perfect now, and yet not all tablets are succeeding in the market. Because they suck.
iPad pretty much does that, at least for email and buying audio and video and apps from iTMS. Windows tablets didn't - they were local data, handwriting based, windowed Apps, like a movable desktop.
They didn't just fail because their spec was poor and their tech was early, they failed because they weren't a compelling thing to use, they were like an ordinary computer but worse.
It wasn't timing, it was simply that Microsoft didn't get that a tablet was something different.
The problem is that, if a "flat screen running windows with a pen" is a shitty experience that nobody in their right mind would buy, you're better off not bringing it to market.
Microsoft didn't earn a gold star for "trying"; they wrecked their brand by associating it with ten years of shitty tablet products nobody wanted.
Sometimes it's better to realize that if the tech doesn't exist to let you execute your product well, you're better off not harming your brand by executing it poorly.
Actually I don't think most MS execs think they build the same cloud product. I think they believe they have the feature set, but they realize, probably better than most, that they're not as well integrated. This is largely due to antitrust concerns.
MS has been hamstrung on doing deep integration for a lot of features. Live Mesh is a killer feature if built into Win7. As an optional download, no one ever even knows it exists.
With the rise of tablets and mobile phones as computers, they may finally begin to be able to start adding functionality typically seen in standalone apps to the OS (as they can argue they no longer have a monopoly in the personal computing space). Until they feel comfortable doing that they're going to continue to just have silo'ed apps that never get traction. And I think their execs know it.
There are some things where this is almost certainly the case, like antivirus. For some other things, some of it has to do with selling an OS and not the whole package.
But I do think the cloud is one area where they'd love to have tighter integration -- but will DropBox, Amazon, and Google protest if they do? That's something that Apple doesn't have to worry about at all -- they can tell these other companies to shove it -- we don't have a monopoly.
Update: And we see the next step of their integration with XBox Live built into Windows -- http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-reveals-xbox-live-will-be...
I think that's a pretty large oversimplification.
Microsoft didn't get in trouble just for bundling a browser; they got in trouble for bundling a browser and then using their position of market dominance to lock out competition, e.g., they used Windows licensing agreements to forbade OEMs from preinstalling competing browsers on systems. Microsoft's behavior went well beyond just bundling a browser.
But yes - it takes generations to change a corporate culture, so it may only just starting to change.
Contrast that to Apple's features, which are demoed in keynotes by Jobs and watched by a BIG percentage of Apple users. This is the reason that Apple is an ultra secret company with very high penalties for leaking things out. The hype that precedes every conference, with all the guessing etc. keeps Apple in the headlines and in people's minds. That's what people mean when they say Apple is a marketing company. Contrast that to Microsoft, how many people would watch them tout new features? They do make good stuff, but without their marketing, sales would be a lot slower.
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...
Why didn't MS talk about this at their special Mango VIP event? No idea. MS seems to think that getting too much attention for features is a bad thing.
-- John Gruber recently critiqued the Windows 8 preview video that was uploaded to youtube.
It looked like a high school project. I doubt Apple would ever preview their OS with such a poorly produced video.
Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p92QfWOw88I
I think it's pretty good and clean. The iPad UI looks like a scaled down version of OS X in 2001 compared to that now and I've heard the same sentiment from many other people.
Metro looks like that to new people but is very functional once you start using it. Here is a good primer on it.
http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487
You can have an outsourced service make a demo video with proper voiceover for less than $1,000. That video from Microsoft is just sloppy, not frugal or homespun.
edit grammer
I disagree. Apple isn't selling a product to consumers, they're telling consumers, "Hey guys, by the way, Apple stuff just got a lot better. You're going to like the new way it works. Come check it out." iCloud is "the new way to store and access your content."
Apple knows they're in the business of selling Apple stuff, and iCloud is an improvement to that stuff rather than something separate. The fact that iCloud is a "product" is incidental and only matters to people who are used to thinking in those terms: stock analysts, MBA school marketers, shareholders, etc. To consumers, needing another "product" to do exactly the same things they've always been doing is a nuisance. Another complication? Fuck that. I like what I've got. I don't need them ramming another product down my throat. Apple's on their wavelength: they just want people to keep using Apple products and they want more people to switch. This is all about making existing products work better. Honestly, it would be more attractive to consumers if the this new non-product had no name at all, but Apple had to cater a little bit to all the journalists and analysts and bloggers who need a product name so they can talk about it. So Apple gave it a name that isn't catchy and only means something to people who follow technology trends.
I don't think Microsoft's slowness is just incompetence, though. There's also an issue of trust. Microsoft can't just roll out a cloud service and a whole bunch of cloud-enabled software to desktop users and expect them to use it. Who would trust Microsoft? Apple is just a company and shouldn't be considered trustworthy from a consumer's point of view, but it is regarded with trust and affection by a large number of users. Besides, if jack-booted thugs arrived on my doorstep as a result of something I stored in Apple's iCloud, it would probably be the Fashion Police coming to take me to a gulag for frumpy people (which I'm convinced is Apple's intended endgame.) Not only is Microsoft trusted less by its users, Microsoft wants enterprise customers as much as or more than individual consumers, and the number of businesses who won't trust Microsoft because they see themselves in competition with Microsoft or its business partners (or in violation of Microsoft software licensing terms) is pretty big. Microsoft needs a more complicated solution with better security and probably a productized cloud storage platform so users can manage their own cloud servers if they don't trust Microsoft. Apple is concentrating on consumers and has a loyal customer base that is willing to trust them with storage, so it's no wonder they've found it easier to make the jump.
Would that be Slashdot?
Apple is proof that there is a very fine line between good and great but it's hard to make something good great. Apple has a long history (now) of taking things that suck and making them not suck. How do you define revolutionary?
> the difference is that Apple and Jobs are phenomenal at presenting the idea so that people actually get it.
Marketing people will tell you that good marketing sells products. They have a vested interest in fermenting this view. The truth is simpler: good products sell themselves. Marketing just helps.
The real success of Apple isn't in the success of their market (although their ads are really quite brilliant generally speaking), it's that their products are simple enough TO get.
> The bottom line is that Apple knows how to sell products to consumers
Apple is a consumer hardware company. That's all they really do and care about and it shows.
Microsoft is an OEM and enterprise Windows and Office license selling company and it shows.
Apple can (and did) change their desktop OS to make the best experience possible. In Microsoft there would be a turf war (particularly with Ballmer at the helm, given his history) to make sure that any new product somehow pushes the Windows agenda. A new OS? No way that'll happen.
It's not about marketing, it's about singularity of purpose. The guy with one goal is more often than not going to do better at achieving that goal than the guy with that goal and another one.
2) Being good at sales also yields benefits. Customers benefit substantively when there is a big ecosystem around a solution.
The iPhone is the perfect example. The iPhone UI works because it's FLUID. The lack of lag and the responsiveness is the difference between feeling like you're operating a computer an feeling like you're manipulating something real. That took engineering. They needed a responsive touchscreen, hardware accelerated UI stack, etc, to get that effect. Did other people have capacitive touchscreens and hardware acceleration before? Who knows, what's clear is Apple was the first one to engineer a complete solution.
On spot comment. Cloud file storage and auto replication, file and document automatic sync,Web versions of office. Msft has that. You can even extend sync through API's.
Features are there, but seems like nobody knows about it, discoverability is lacking.
Unless by services they means software updates, CDDB updates, and downloading Office templates...
Yet, can you imagine how many sales Apple will be able to take from Microsoft just by saying, "all your files are backed up and synced automatically between your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Mac devices." No more worrying about backups, losing your photos, or losing your music.
Up until now GeekSquad and other computer repair businesses made a killing just on moving files between machines when you replace them or recovering lost files.
Apple is getting this right because it helps them sell more devices. Microsoft is getting it wrong because it would cost them a lot and wouldn't sell more copies of Windows or Office.
I think that is an important point.
It's not magic: it's syncing in the background.
At this point in time, Apple's success in the "software+cloud" model is the same as that of Microsoft (in that neither have seen mass wide adoption).
The use of "humiliation" in the title is an obvious exaggeration. But I guess without such title, that article wouldn't end up on the front page of HN.
People generally do not use Apple products that suck, not everything they do takes off. They are just vocal about things that take off and very quiet on the rest, e.g. dismissing AppleTV as a "hobby" even though they clearly want it to take off.
You can attribute Apple's success to marketing, cult, whatever you want but at the end of the day Apple makes good products and puts a lot of care into them, and that's why they sell.
I am typing this on an iPad that periodically loses its wifi connection. Googling the problem yields dozens of complaints about this issue. Apple supporters on these forums blame wifi routers, even though the iPad is the only device with these issues.
I like the App Store, but, by default, I can't buy games on my iPad - why? Because I live in South Africa, and unlike every other device manufacturer with an app store here Apple hasn't applied for self rating games, which, according to most sources, is a straightforward process. Again, Apple and its supporters don't bother mentioning this little detail.
Apple does put a lot of care into their devices, but I also think there is a tendency to deny issues, to brush them over and to rely on the cult to impart an aura of invincibility.
I agree that it's bad that they deny most problems instead of being transparent about them. It can be extremely frustrating, you file a Radar ticket and then it goes into a black hole and the only feedback you might get is that someone else had the problem too. They are by no means perfect and neither are their products, I didn't mean to imply anything like that.
Apple is providing smart remote storage that works with local applications.
Browser apps are clunkier than web apps, at least for now and the immediate future, so Apple has the apparent edge.
Microsoft got a lot of criticism for Windows 7 touch capabilities for taking something designed for mouse input and adding touch on top. It wasn't designed for that. I think that's exactly what Apple is doing here with iCloud. They are taking something that was designed for local access (native applications) and are attempting to shoehorn cloud into it.
iCloud will never work as seamlessly as a web application. Consumers will not be fooled. You can't go to your friends house and edit a document stored in iCloud. You can't pull up a Word document at the library. But you can access your Facebook account. You can open a spreadsheet in Office Web Apps.
Apple is selling iCloud because they have to. Customer perception is not on their side on this one, finally. It's a very tough sell. 1) You have to commit to the complete Apple ecosystem. 2) You have to give up the ability to access your files anywhere. My guess is that most common consumers will not fully embrace iCloud. I don't expect it to be the same type of runaway success that iTunes and iPhone were. Rather it is more likely to be a moderate success: something people use when it's convenient but not something people change their habits to accommodate.
MS has been doing a lot of catch-up "also-ran" devices trying to do what Apple has done. It's unfortunate that they could never leverage their huge lead to make it happen.
Apple's brand identity works for selling consumer products, but nobody really finds value in the fact that their music player or phone was branded Microsoft. Their brand's strength isn't in consumer tech.
Apple didn't manage this by standing still, either. Their brand used to be Apple Computer, and their logo was a cheesy rainbow. That doesn't cut it with 21st century consumers, so they redrew their image.
The downvotes are coming from . . . people who think setting up MS home sharing is easy? (Maybe people who have never done it -- I have.) Or people who genuinely believe branding is more important than the product being branded? I have no use for either of these perspectives but I am curious.
There was a Steve Jobs keynote from the 1990s posted the other day in which he outlined his vision of a networked device ecosystem. It is very significant that they built the line of devices before they tried to market the backbone. Microsoft was thinking about this concept for just as long, but they never really had the platform.
Edit: To reply, the key is that product follows from brand and marketing. The reason Apple's products are connected so well is that they're all targeted at one market. Microsoft target several, so their products are developed in bubbles.
Edit: To reply again, I think we may be arguing the same thing, but our disagreement is in the reasoning. I believe that Microsoft's lack of a coherent product is due to an attempt to sell their vision to several markets at once; it makes connecting the dots very difficult. Apple's (assumed) success lies in their coherent targeting of a single market, through their strong consumer brand. Both of them are selling a vision; Apple get to amplify this by designing products that fit with their brand.
It's a shame we can't continue this conversation further due to the weird commenting system.
To reply to your edit: I think that brand and marketing come from product. You cannot market a feature that does not exist, nor can your brand gain a reputation for an attribute that your products do not have. But underneath, product, brand, and marketing all stem from vision and priorities. Apple and MS shared the same vision, but Apple made this part of that vision a priority. Therefore their products reflect it, their brand gains a reputation for it, and their marketing can highlight the features that support the vision. Microsoft made this part of their vision a talking point, thus their products don't reflect it, their brand lacks the reputation, and any marketing that tries to highlight connectedness of devices rings hollow.
The cloud or syncing are the way to share content. Not by sharing actual live content on laptops.
Apple gives the "cloud" branding and a logo.
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb263932(v=vs.85).as...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/business/technology-micros...
Factually, this is incorrect. All of the services are available within the browser, but there have been native mobile apps available for gmail/docs/calendar for quite some time now.
On a similar note, many people buy macs because they "don't have viruses" which has to do with market share not that they aren't vulnerable as we all know. Am I the only one who believes the Mac App Store is just the beginning of them closing off the system so that in the case they reach a substantial market share they can avoid virus control by making sure you download directly from them? If M$FT told dev's you can only put software on our machines if you give us 30% ppl would go nuts.
Just saying, the fanboyism keeps many users from being critical, in the end they are a company, question every move they make as with google and M$FT.
The biggest issue for MS isn't just that iCloud might be an embarrassment. It's a full on attack on the Windows monopoly. Apple telegraphed this in the WWDC presentation when they showed the stats on the numbers of people who don't own a personal computer (either Mac or Windows) in different countries around the world. The combination of iCloud + iPad means that the iPad can be a standalone device. This could potentially be huge in markets like China. How many SharePoint licenses does MS have to sell to make up for ceding a significant portion of the untapped Chinese PC market to the iPad?
I'm sure Apple's considered it, but I doubt they see enough of a market in the product to bother packaging it up and selling it. It's obvious that they're not incredibly interested in the server or high-end enterprise market, and they're perfectly content to let their Activesync integration carry them for now.
I think they just don't have the capacity to do more big things right now. When/if iOS gets put on medium heat like OSX is/was, then maybe we they'll try this. It's not really much harm waiting a few years to see if/how some of the newer Apple stuff (iOS, icloud) and its competition gets used by large companies.
I also feel that maybe similar to Marco Arment's comments on the benefits of the new features in iOS on Instapaper, this may be the case for MSFT. If Apple can pave the way to making consumers' understand or at least appreciate what the cloud can do for them, then Microsoft and Google and others will have an easier time talking about their products. Before the iPhone came out, people couldn't see why and didn't want a "smartphone". Now everyone wants one, whether it's an iPhone or Android (and in the next few years Microsoft).
Microsoft does have some great products in this sphere I believe, Mesh and Skydrive being two. I haven't used either, but from what I've heard they do have some great potential. If off the back of Apple's announcement they can make them look good and continue developing on them, they will be able to sell it, even if its just by saying its the same as iCloud, but made by us. Apple does have a reputation of creating beautiful, easy to use products, but they are also seen as expensive and sometimes unneccessary. Android has taken off by being an alternative - Microsoft have the potential to be that alternative to iCloud. They have the pieces and experience shows MSFT does much better when they are the underdogs (Xbox and WP).
Just my two cents.
Until iCloud is launched (not til the fall), all we have is old broken promises, vapourware, and some very expensive data centres.
I want iCloud to live up to the hype as much as anyone. But at this point the only thing we should be calling a success is the awesome power of the Jobs Distortion Field. He's the tech equivalent of a superstar athlete in their prime and the top of their game - evidenced by articles like these.
There's a beta. Register and download it.
Personally, I like Apple's (and for the most part Microsoft) "we don't give a shit about you unless you pay us money." When I stop paying them, I don't have to worry about them keeping any of my data. When I stop using Google products do I have the same guarantee? This is the same argument I use against Facebook.
At least Google is sorta-kinda upfront that they're doing it.
I'd also point out that Apple is entering a market that it has traditionally not done well in and is pushing an unnatural definition of cloud that consumers will be forced to either accept or reject.
You and I will continue to use DropBox, Flickr, rsync, tar, scp, Aperture, svn, Eclipse, and jailbroken iPhones.
The other 95% of Apple's customers will relish the fact that all the sudden, for free, they can take a picture on their iPhone, show it to their friend on their iPad, and then show it to the entire family on their AppleTV without having to do anything but take the picture.
And you can bet that Apple learned their lessons with MobileMe.
Basically, Apple is betting the farm on providing a private back-end infrastructure that front ends all of their products. It is certainly a gamble and fraught with land-mines, but if they pull it off it will serve to take away additional market share from Google and the other big OS/Mobile companies.
2) 95% of Apple's customers don't have an iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV (or a Mac). In fact, I would wager than the number of Apple customers who have more than 1 Apple product is south of 40%, the number with more than 2 south of 20%. Those who are entirely sold into the ecosystem, an extreme minority. Those people, the ones who might stand to gain from this service are the oddballs.
They weren't huge sweeping successes because they didn't have enough features and cost a LOT. But the features they did have worked well.
MobileMe was just .Mac rebranded with more features.
iCloud is just MobileMe rebranded with more features.
Apple is smart for recognizing when they need to rebrand for communication facilitation. But don't be fooled. iCloud is just MobileMe with a facelift a few new features.
Mail, calendar, address book, bookmarks, iPad backup – all of that works without a hitch for me and it is fast. If the more important parts (documents API) work the same then I foresee no problems.
Once again, the big difference is price and the documents API, not performance. Sometimes that’s enough to make all the difference.
Through their own efforts, Microsoft means Office, which means corporate. Unsurprisingly, their best consumer success is only tangentially associated with their name. "Microsoft Xbox" sounds like "Accounting Bouncy-house" to most people. There's a little bit of a dissonance when you remember that, yeah, Microsoft made this game system.
Even Windows, which is used by a majority of consumers today, feels like using a work tool at home, rather than something more personal. The way it communicates with you is like a colleague, not a friend. There are features that are the same as equivalent features on other operating systems, sometimes better, sometimes worse. But they are designed to make you "more productive", not to help you. Even when the mechanism is the same, it feels off as a personal device...
So, it's unsurprising that M advertises the Cloud heavily and it just feels like a "team-building" video, whereas A takes advantage of M's "to the cloud" ads building awareness to do a small press push and a brief description in a presentation and it's perceived as the second-coming.
And here's the thing, the "to the cloud" idea as marketing is a great idea! It's funny, and totally memorable -- but the Microsoft brand just kills it dead.
People love Windows7 and the virus/security thing is now no longer cool to say. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is widely proclaimed as one of the best security apps available -- recently there was a thread on Reddit asking for 'Must have free apps' and seemingly every second person was suggesting MSE. In regards to maintenance, registry cleaners, defraggers and the like all seem to be fading away from our view. Like with security, speaking of 'BSODs' has dramatically died down and Win7 is not known for stability issues.
It shows you a bunch of features under the vague branding of "Windows Live" and "The Cloud", but it's not really clear what you're supposed to buy or download to get them. Are you supposed to run out and buy one of those touch-screen desktops they're showing off to get the features? Is Windows Live a thing you buy in store? Are these features actually already in Windows 7, and if so, in which apps?
As a techie I'm aware of the distinctions between Windows, Windows Live, the Cloud, and the touch screen computers that feature prominently in these ads, but most people aren't.
Apple is great at clearly getting across the idea that say, iCloud is baked into Lion and iOS 5, so be prepared to get those things to get all the benefits of the iCloud. They give you a simple name to hang all of the benefits they talk about on, a concrete way of obtaining said named item, and a date to expect to go and buy it.
Microsoft, in contrast, can't seem to clearly articulate to people how to get the benefits they are being shown.
Who does not know of the Xbox? What average family does not want Office on their PC/Mac? Look at the success of Windows7.. and so on..
Average families that don't want Office? Any of them with a Mac. iWork is cheaper, integrates better, and is generally easy to use, plus the templates are much nicer. For the 99% of people who use 1% of Office's features, iWork is more than 'good enough', it's 'much better'.
Windows 7 was a success because Vista was junk and XP is ten years old and showing its age. It's a good OS, but people are buying it because XP just isn't good enough anymore and it's Windows 7 or Mac OS X.
Microsoft's brand is hurting because they don't have a cohesive strategy for the things they do. They've launched two separate mobile phone platforms in the last few years; one of which was cancelled almost immediately after launch, and the other, while extremely promising, is floundering in the market so far.
Microsoft needs serious top-down leadership, not middle-outwards leadership, and until they get that, their brand is going to continue to suffer.
Its a very good example of the Innovator's Dilemma [1] in action, you've got some smart folks who see a future problem, and start creating interesting technology and vision around that problem, and then the reality that the company doesn't "need" it now gets in the way of pushing it from concept into the product stream. So it never gets to the 'commit' point where everyone is on board with shipping it to customers and trying to support it.
Why? Because that is "risky" but just tweaking the current product stream and adding a few features or targeting an adjacent market is much lower "risk."
As Clayton points out in his book innovation always loses in the 'risk' evaluation. So companies that are 'managed' always strive for optimum returns, and since you can't predict the future they are risk averse. Companies that are 'lead' on the other hand have the capability to ignore the risk in order to get to the rewards on the other side.
Startups have the risk meter pegged so it doesn't enter into their management decisions, instead they are focussed on execution and they flame out or succeed as they will and when they succeed they clarify the risk around their idea (if it flops the managers can pat themselves on the back for avoiding that land mine, if it takes off the managers wring their hands and wonder if they should have been able to forecast that success.
I think Apple may have combined some protocols and services into a useful adjunct to their product strategy. We won't really know until later when we see how it fairs. From the presentations and markitecture that Microsoft has espoused it seems like they could have done something similar but they didn't. It does reflect badly on how they are being managed, and that buck does stop at Ballmer. So it will be interesting to see how this affects his future there.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060521996
(FWIW I'm a big fan of Windows Live Mesh, but I've known more than a handful of non-techies who were just confused by it when I suggested it due to the related-but-different products that pop up when they are trying to learn more about it).
This does seem to be a problem they are aware of given the unification work they've done with the products I used as an example, but they still have a very long way to go on this.
Instead, the penalties resulted in a lot of backtracking and some very cautious positioning that cost them the competitive edge while tiptoeing through the legalese.
They haven't delivered Live SkyDrive, or Windows Live, or http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ or http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-hosted-services.asp... or http://www.microsoft.com/hosting/en/us/solutions/hostedcrm.a... or http://www.microsoft.com/online/sharepoint-online.aspx or http://www.hotmail.com or the MSN Music store?
Windows Live <-> Gmail services
Azure <-> Amazon AWS / Google AppServ
Sharepoint <-> DropBox / Google {Docs|Groups}
Hotmail <-> Gmail
MSN Music <-> iTunes
But what the Chronicle was pointing out (and others here) is that the iCloud stuff is (if Jobs is accurate) the 'rest' of your UX experience with everything in their product line. For me its the difference between telling all your developers "You can assume that iCloud will be attached to this device" and "add #ifdef (some optional service) other feature."
One is point responses to specific offerings through network services, and the other is retooling your architecture and baking in network connectivity.
Googe Maps vs Streets and Trips was always one of those things, Maps doesn't work if you're not connected to the Internet, S&T does because of its builtin database. As that decision relates to customer facing issues, in the Google case your map is always (nearly) current, in the S&T case you may not know that the freeway extension was completed last year. But Google loses when you can't connect you get slow (Edge) or no maps on your phone, but not a problem for S&T. Google 'bakes in' the assumption that you're on the network.
"Delivering on the vision" requires a vision to exist and be articulated, and then to outline a roadmap of deliverables between now and the time you feel like the vision is 'delivered.' To my way of looking at things that is where Microsoft could do much much better than they have.
[update: fair point on sharepoint, I admit I didn't know it existed until it was offered as an alternative to what Google had to offer. I'm guessing that it was very enterprise targeted early on. ]
And Hotmail a decade before Gmail. (nearly.)
And the web versions of Office are certainly more functional (tho arguably less usable) than Gdocs -- especially when Office Live launched and you still, at the time, couldn't do Find and Replace in a Google Document without seeing several "EXPERIMENTAL!" warnings all over it.
And something the GP didn't mention, but that can be added to his list, is that Microsoft invented ajax when it released the XHR object feature to enable web-based outlook.
Though, sure, Ajax-like behavior was possible (tho not popular and very clunky -- i know first hand) using iFrames. But come to think of it, I think Microsoft invented iFrames, too...
I recall hearing inside stories of the difficulties they had moving it off the Sun hardware/OS onto their own OS...
Microsoft even has an entire document on how they did the migration: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb496985.aspx
I notice the article mentions "various unix Systems" then goes on to talk exclusively of the FreeBSD web front end. I still have vague (perhaps 12 year old) memories aout the actual mail storage and management being Sun kit... (mostly from the point of view of a bunch of friends who worked at Sun being outrageously amused at the ballsup of multiple attempts at migration...)
"Sharepoint <-> DropBox / Google {Docs|Groups}"
There is no comparison: Sharepoint is not a me too product. SharePoint was Microsoft's fastest Billion, yes Billion, dollar product. For you to throw that in is not logical.
Unless you're blind or have not been paying any attention to Microsoft for the past ~ > 4 years . .
Others have put forward [incomplete] lists of Microsoft's various 'cloud' services and I'll add one.
Microsoft Azure. Hell, wasn't there a story on the frontpage of HN a day or so ago that iCloud uses it? I haven't read much into it so it may be a rumour.
The moment someone like Apple starts running a MS-based stack... well, I'd stay inside for fear of airborne pigs.
Let's see - a company that is solidly 'nix (to the point where their own desktop OS is POSIX), who has zero track record of building anything using a MS stack, is suddenly going to use MS's cloud offering, despite there being as-good (more likely, better) 'nix based solutions?
Mmm. I'm willing to put money on that one :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2654918
> As Clayton points out in his book innovation always loses in the 'risk' evaluation.
That's not my understanding - can you indicate where he says that?
Your profile says you work for Blekko, and in a senior enough position that I'm going to assume you're not naive enough to actually believe this. Startups are every bit as capable as risk aversion as BigCos, albeit for different reasons. At BigCos, it's sheer organizational inertia you have to deal with. At startups, you have the exact opposite problem: "We're so new and unestablished that we just can't afford to take that kind of risk".
Humans are, as a general rule, afraid of risk.
Then there are other risks which everyone is afraid of, like the risk of running out of capital before you're done (perhaps exemplified as the risk of pivoting) and one that is more damning in start-ups the risk of not having enough capital after you release, and your idea fails, to do another idea. While failure is always a possibility, it always hurts.
I accept your premise that humans, in general, are afraid of risk.
Perhaps I should narrow my claim to specifically say that large companies are more afraid of 'new product' risk than companies that aren't currently shipping any products.
I've always felt (but have no direct knowledge of) that Microsoft's initial failure to capture any sort of tablet market was their fear of creating a "new product" that would compete with Windows. I used one of the early Toshiba tablet PCs and was always saddened by what looked like a lack of commitment on Microsoft's part to the notion of a tablet in its software stack. When I used an iPad for the first time I didn't feel like it was a less capable version of MacOS.