>
"1) "Social Experiences" - Ping failed where... who succeeded?"Facebook + Spotify. I actually see people sharing the music they listen to. Not to mention, it is indeed very possible to fail without someone else succeeding - i.e., launching a product nobody ever wanted (say, Ping).
> "You realize Apple pioneered desktop search, right?"
And now the competition is much better than they are. Your point?
> "Where's the problem, exactly?"
iCloud. Have you written an iCloud-enabled app recently? I was in the iCloud session at this year's WWDC, and damn that was a tense session - developers approached this session with "hopefully this shit finally works", because iCloud up until that point was broken, and still largely is.
If you look behind Apple's hyperbolic claims and actually look at the API and work with it, you will realize iCloud is pretty much loosely held together by string. It breaks often, the API is obtuse and more or less undocumented, and there are very few ways to look under the hood when it does break, even while in dev, much less production.
Apple really, really sucks at data synchronization. Here's an interesting test: take an iCloud-enabled app, go into your settings and delete the app's cloud data. You would expect this to delete your data and let you start fresh right? But nope, none of your devices associated with this Apple account can ever use iCloud with this app again.