iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

#51

Post by eddieplan9 » Tue, Jun 07, 2011, 6:57 PM UTC

dagar wrote: post #14

"Having been shown the way by Apple, I expect Google to shortly do the same thing, adding automated backup, synchronization and migration to Android and Chrome." Doesn't my android phone already do this?

IIRC, Android sort of does what iCloud does, but iCloud is very different and IMHO a much better offering from a developer perspective. According to Apple's website:

iCloud Storage APIs enable your apps to store documents and key value data in iCloud. iCloud will wirelessly push documents to a user's device automatically and update the documents when changed on any device — automatically.

iCloud allows an app developer to treat the cloud as a natural extension of the iOS device. In-cloud storage is almost as easy to use as saving data locally, and you get push synchronization for free.

This is similar to Dropbox, but baked right into the system APIs. I don't think there is anything like this in Android. You of course can hack something using Google Storage API or Amazon S3, but they are very different beasts from iCloud: while iCloud associate the storage with a user, Google and Amazon associate it with an app. That difference has a huge implication. iCloud makes it trivially easy to synchronize data for one app across devices of the same user. To achieve the same thing with Google and Amazon's offerings, you would have to provide your own code to identify user, isolate data of different users in the cloud, and bring in your own synchronization/push magic. On the other hand, if you want to mine across data of all users - answering questions like the most-bookmarked pages - then you might feel iCloud's extra layer of abstraction getting into your way.

Re: iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

#52

Post by mturmon » Tue, Jun 07, 2011, 7:01 PM UTC

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #10

spenrose wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvoted b/c I think your rejection of Cringely is right, but the reason is different. Jobs/Apple are not in this for the money. They simply believe that iOS + cloud is a better way to compute.

Your comment feels like it is giving Jobs and Apple a bit more altruism than I think they deserve. They are absolutely in it for the money, but I think you are also right that they see this as a better way of computing: a way that can make computing better and easier for many people (who, in turn will give Apple more money). It is a win-win for Aplle and the consumer, which is a great place for a company to be.

This quote rings true:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2813-do-you-want-to-sell-suga...

Re: iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

#53

Post by soofaloofa » Tue, Jun 07, 2011, 7:01 PM UTC

programminggeek wrote: post #3

iCloud is a great idea, so is Google Apps, so is Office 365. None are designed to "kill Windows". iCloud's real purpose is to sell more Apple hardware, not kill Windows. Hurting Windows sales would simply be a side effect. It's a smart move to put iPads and iPhones on equal footing as the Mac in that regard. If your docs, pictures, apps, and music are all on iCloud, your computers become disposable digital devices. W…

Agreed. Lock-in is the real win for Apple here.

Re: iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

#54

Post by super_mario » Tue, Jun 07, 2011, 7:04 PM UTC

Seriously, UNIX guys have had this for decades. Ever heard of keeping your user directory and profile on the network server. So when you walk around the office and log into different machines your HOME "travels" with you.

The network server now just lives on a server outside your organization/home what ever. The network speed now becomes the biggest limitation, and there are valid concerns with security as well.

Re: iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

#55

Post by JonnieCache » Tue, Jun 07, 2011, 7:09 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #49

spenrose wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvoted b/c I think your rejection of Cringely is right, but the reason is different. Jobs/Apple are not in this for the money. They simply believe that iOS + cloud is a better way to compute.

They simply believe that iOS + cloud is a better way to compute. At WWDC. I won't say anything specific, but I'm beginning to think that Apple's business model is/has been to take all the awesome stuff that people developed in research labs since the 60's, and they're implementing it when/where it makes sense . Basically, Apple has been in the business of arbitrage of R&D awesomeness. (As opposed to the most common u…

>take all the awesome stuff that people developed in research labs since the 60's, and they're implementing it when/where it makes sense.

If this is true, then that is also google's model, except they're doing it with server-side algorithms as opposed to UI implementations/hardware form factors.

You don't think google invented MapReduce, their translation algos, their vision algos, their concurrency models and so on? They get them out of research papers from years gone by. Then they implement them at real-world scale, and iterate them until they're suitably awesome, just like apple does with the ideas they resurrect from academia.

This is analogous to how every perceived leap forward in programming paradigms always seems to end up dating back to 1956.

Re: iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

#56

Post by atlei » Tue, Jun 07, 2011, 7:10 PM UTC

Step 1: Get all Mac/iPhone/iPad users to use the iCloud

Step 2: Integrate API (with access to your data) and a MacCloud Store

Now, it doesn't matter if you purchase software using your iPhone/iPad, Mac or the cloud; Apple will get 30% of all purchases anyway. Brilliant !

Re: iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

#57

Post by hernan7 » Tue, Jun 07, 2011, 7:13 PM UTC

Cringely: "consumers have been leading the IT market for the last decade"

More like for the last 3 decades (the IBM PC came out in 1981).

Re: iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

#58

Post by eropple » Tue, Jun 07, 2011, 7:23 PM UTC

ugh wrote: post #35

eropple wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I use Pages (part of Apple's iWork) for almost everything. If I need Word comparability, I open LibreOffice. And if you need to do something remotely complex, neither works. Pages is decent for the very baseline word processing; OpenOffice is good for very little of anything. The overwhelming majority of people use Office because what you call "cruft" is what other people call "important".

Overwhelming majority? I doubt it. I have no doubt at all that there is a small minority of people who absolutely cannot do without some feature of Word that no competitor offers. But that’s a minority, not a majority. The reason why I’m using Word, why my parents use Word, why my friends use Word (despite not needing any feature it has over Pages or OpenOffice) is that everyone else is using it. Importing and export…

I can't find the link offhand but I recall it being said by someone affiliated with Office that pretty much everyone uses about 20% of Word's features. The difference is in which 20%.

You might have a set of feature needs that Pages covers. I know that pretty much everyone in my company (that is, management and project people--engineers could get by with whatever, that's not a big deal) couldn't use Pages, and their needs are not extreme or out-there.

Re: iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

#59

Post by baconner » Tue, Jun 07, 2011, 7:26 PM UTC

Remember the big stink about being able to bring your us cellphone number with you to a new provider? The new era of consumer cloud data looks like its going to take customer lock in to new heights. IMO it's time to start rallying for a universal right to export.

Re: iCloud’s Real Purpose is to Kill Windows

#60

Post by jvi » Tue, Jun 07, 2011, 7:29 PM UTC

jherdman wrote: post #42

hnsmurf wrote: post #21

I don't get it. Most of what iCloud does is already being done on smartphones for free. Gmail and Exchange Server both already sync contacts, calendars, and email quite nicely across devices. I haven't had to manually transfer any of that to a new smartphone since long before there was an iPhone. The music thing is nice too, but it's either a paid solution or an incomplete one. Apple once released a stat that only 10…

The key differentiating factor is that the iCloud heralds an era wherein all of your data is decentralized, all of the time, and that this is the default for all users, on all Apple devices, all of the time.

This is different, how? Gmail/Calendar/etc is decentralized all the time.