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.
For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
81–90 of 176 posts
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
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…
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.
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...
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#83Microsoft 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).
Just my two cents.
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#84Google is providing facsimiles of applications in the web browser, along with remote storage. 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.
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.
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#85My 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.
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#86I 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 kn…
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Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#87I 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 kn…
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.
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 downvot…
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.
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes the market is just not there, and it's more about the timing.
So you're saying that one of the spectacularly failed Windows powered tablets from yesteryear would succeed today, because the "timing is right"? 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.
Exactly right. They weren't even true tablets, they were laptops with swivel screens and a stylus.
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
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…
> 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.