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For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

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Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#131

Post by Lozzer »

dkl wrote: post #91

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 ban…

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.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#132

Post by bigiain »

encoderer wrote: post #126
ChuckMcM wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 betwee…

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,…

Didn't they buy hotmail after it became wildly popular?

I recall hearing inside stories of the difficulties they had moving it off the Sun hardware/OS onto their own OS...

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#133

Post by blantonl »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #125
paulitex wrote: post #96

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…

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 wid…

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.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#134

Post by biturd »

jolan wrote: post #98
paulitex wrote: post #96

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…

> vapourware There's a beta. Register and download 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?

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#135

Post by Hoff »

elehack wrote: post #101
JunkDNA wrote: post #79

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'…

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.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#136

Post by stcredzero »

dkarl wrote: post #40
jasonkolb wrote: post #5

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 kn…

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 i…

be the Fashion Police coming to take me to a gulag for frumpy people

Would that be Slashdot?

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#137

Post by lukifer »

rimantas wrote: post #26
brown9-2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> pressing Save on a document open You will not need to even do that. It's autosaved. Coming to Lion next month.

It's downright embarrassing how long it has taken the computer industry to make that the default behavior.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#138

Post by msbarnett »

ezy wrote: post #103

Microsoft killed their own brand. 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 con…

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.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#139

Post by forensic »

paulitex wrote: post #96

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…

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.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#140

Post by X-Istence »

bigiain wrote: post #132
encoderer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Didn't they buy hotmail after it became wildly popular? I recall hearing inside stories of the difficulties they had moving it off the Sun hardware/OS onto their own OS...

They bought it well before gmail even came around. Hotmail when they bought it was running on top of FreeBSD not Solaris.

Microsoft even has an entire document on how they did the migration: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb496985.aspx

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