“We believe Apple’s iCloud product could be a game changer,” MGI Research writes for Seeking Alpha. “iCloud fires a shot across the bow directed squarely at Microsoft’s Office365 and Google’s Small Business Apps cloud productivity offerings because iCloud provides a near frictionaless adoption path for Apple iOS device customers. It is quite likely that the iCloud announcement serves notice to investors in highly visible upstarts Dropbox, Sugarsync, Evernote and others that their free ride is over.”
“Amongst the raft of features announced by Apple at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, the announcement of iCloud was in our view the most significant. It is also the one announcement that got somewhat lost in press coverage as the iTunes in the cloud music sharing service overshadowed what is in our view a real game changer for the personal and groupware productivity solutions markets,” MGI Research writes. “iCloud, in our view, is the first cloud solution from a major vendor that has a clear brand identity; an understandable, compelling offer; and is likely to re-shape multiple markets in the next 12 months.”
MGI Research writes, “From here on, [with Apple’s ad-free iCloud], any individual professional or a small business or a group can easily and freely establish a cloud-based, shared and synchronized office environment. This is a direct shot at Google Docs as well as at Microsoft. With the simple announcement of iCloud as a free productivity solution, Apple has quickly outpaced Microsoft and Google, both of whom have been trying now for a few years to carve out a viable productivity cloud strategy and are now forced to play catch up.”
Much more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Hey… Google Finance is showing AAPL price as $0 (-100% for the day)!!!
(along with MSFT, GOOG, AMZN, others…)
EVERYONE PANIC NOW :0
Panic?
DUDE I’M BUYING! 🙂
“Brother can you spare a dime?” acquired a new meaning, then. At a price of $0.00 per share, that dime could buy an infinite number of shares of AAPL.
Unfortunately, my broker says ‘No way!”
Seems to be a recurring theme; other companies playing catchup to Apple.
Apple is such a hot dog of a company.
I think what Apple just did was a great way to kill off Microsoft’s business model.
1) Apple has set the value of the best OS on the planet at $30 for use with all of your home computers. Do you really think Microsoft can sell their crap for $100 or $300 per PC!
2) Apple set the iWorks cost way under that of Microsoft office. And Apple is using a billion dollar server farm to keep your non Microsoft files in sync with your iOS devices and your Macs.
3) Apple removed the need to own any computer if you only want an iOS device. Just cut Microsoft out of the iOS device market.
4) Steve Jobs just landed the Apple spaceship on the same plot of land that HP owned. The world will come to see the architectural marvel that was built over the dead body of the largest PC box maker. Very symbolic. Many armies and civilizations do this to crush the spirits of the defeated people in the land.
Steve Jobs and Apple are gutting Microsoft and these talking heads can’t see that Apple is doing this.
I think even the dancing monkey understands what just happened!
If Microsoft were to set its Windows OS at $30, expect Microsoft’s revenue and profits to plunge deeply. With Apple’s iCloud strategy another pillar of Microsoft cash cows, Microsoft Office would be seriously threatened. The Titanic is sinking fast and the band is playing to calm down the board of Microsoft.
The problem is that just about no one buys Windows in the box. They buy it installed on a new computer; the reason they buy new computers is to abandon the bag of hurt that the previous Window box became as it was used over a year or three. Also, remeber MS has issued new OS releases so infrequently that they about correspond to the hardware update cycle.
The only people who buy Windows boxed are geeks – either for their home built system, or because they are MS fanbois who just have to suffer with Redmond’s latest bundle of bugs.
iCloud while having some great features, suffers the same issue that Google and MS suffer.
SECURITY
It does not matter how good a cloud service is right now, no one I know who directs any IT operations will trust their data to a cloud provider.
There are just too many issues that do not have solid answers at this point.
How is your cloud data secured?
I’m not talking just hackers, who are the people maintaining the data center?
MS is known to use contract labor for IT datacenter operations. I’m not sure I want to trust some dude who is going to revolve through the door in 11 months.
Disaster planning – What is the plan when your cloud provider experiences downtime? It sure is not in your hands at that point. God knows how long you might be waiting before you are back in business.
I’ve just hit on two off the top of my head, this is really the tip of the iceberg on the things going through my mind and while I’ll be saying “No” for some time.
MS and Google do offer the hardware and software to build your own ‘private cloud’. I’m hoping Apple looks to do the same with iCloud, that would really put them in a good place.
If you think there is ANY chance that Apple is going to outsource your data, you are sorely mistaken. I’m sure Apple is quite good at security and disaster planning.
If your fears were real, iCloud would be hosted in Cyber City in India (or Mumbai).. Not at the new server farm near Charlotte, NC (et al).
I feel confident that Apple will state all this in their SLA. They have to in order to capture the corporate market. They have BCP’s to maintain as well.
Its entirely possible they could bring in contractors at the datacenter, they have done it in other areas of Apple. Its ‘just support’ (god I hear that so often in meetings)
I think all of these guys are a long way off from ‘capturing’ the corporate market.
In the case of iCloud, it does not even appear to be targeted towards corporate usage from the information I can find available. I can’t integrate it with active directory, I do not see any real provisions for access controls, versioning, archiving, document life cycle management or a lot of other things I’d expect from a corporate service.
There is no way I’d trust MS Office 365 either but at least they offer these things and appear to be far ahead of iCloud when it comes to a corporate cloud offering.
I think its all far more hype than anything else at this point.
iCloud is not targeted at corporate usage. Why would corporations need to have their photos and music stored somewhere?
Apple doesn’t target corporate users, or haven’t you figured that out yet? See the utter lack of marketing and subsequent termination of Xserve. Apple builds its products for consumers, who then demand to use the best devices in their corporate jobs, and thus infiltrates the corporate world that way.
I think you’re jumping to conclusions, just like most people. Try waiting for Apple to release more information. Also, it’s not like your data is ONLY stored on iCloud, UNLIKE what Google wants you to do through Chrome. Your data is still stored on your devices/Macs/PCs, it’s just synced through iCloud (stored there, yes, for syncing purposes, but Apple does not want to be solely responsible for your data).
I agree. Apple’s iCloud services were never meant to enhance or replace the enterprise solutions available to corporations.
But, I’m sure tens-of-thousands of small businesses, organizations, academia, along with tens-of-millions of households, will find it very useful.
I agree also. What corporation can receive just 5 GB in the cloud and survive?!
iCloud is for the iLife first, then, maybe iWork, but mainly as Jobs put it, moving your digital life (songs, photos, books, etc.) from your desktop to the cloud. That’s all this announcement was about. But to offer all those nine apps that comprise iCloud for free and to have the cloud sync your iOS and Mac devices is priceless and that has to have MS, Google and others craping in their collective pants!
Is that why MS was really late with Vista and Google is in perpetual Beta… Apple keeps moving the goal posts and it’s why they’ll never score!
Security? Really? We still have people beating that old red herring greased drum? Seems you don’t really understand what Apple is doing. If the data center washed out to sea, the data still resides on the individual machines of desired. If you think of the iCould as a tuple space sync forum then you know that the security issue is something that 80s IT guys still ramble on because they still don’t understand technology that has been in use since the late 90s in the form of redundant web services. Keep beating that drum! I’ll be betting on cloud services being inevitable, just like I’m betting on SSDs replacing hard drives.
FUD
Exactly the opposite argument that IBM used to make against mini/desktop computers when they ruled the mainframes.
Apple has three data centers at either end of the U.S. Backbone, with more to come (Europe, Asia?). Gas fueled backup and strategic stores means they can run despite any grid disruptions. If a disaster happens that wipes out all three of the iData centsers at once, you will be having bigger problems than missing spreadsheets.
With all those concerns, I would have to advise not to get on the Internet or use it. Since all data is available from your ISP to the person you communicate with at the other end.
Just use a standalone computer and work with the applications you have on it and make sure nothing is uploaded to an Internet connected device and you will be safe. No worries on downtime or danger of losing data. That will be under your control. No worries off the net. Many worries on the Net- well, if you can forget all with ignorance is bliss attitude.
And look how well that worked for Osama bin Laden!
Well said. Although OBL did connect to the ‘net, albeit indirectly.
And that was his downfall.
“How is your cloud data secured?”
I don’t know. I’d be interested in knowing.
I’d like to see a scheme similar to what’s used in my offsite backup. Everything in my computer is backed up to a datacenter somewhere, via the Backblaze service. Everything on their servers is encrypted, using my passphrase that is not stored on their servers or on my computer. Even the Backblaze people can’t look at my data on their servers because it’s encrypted before it’s even sent there.
So even if they got a court order to turn over all my data, it would be encrypted gibberish.
So the NSA would have to make a decision: Would seeing all those photos of my cats be worth a few-hundred grand to break my passphrase?
“the iCloud announcement serves notice to investors in highly visible upstarts Dropbox, Sugarsync, Evernote and others that their free ride is over.”
That’s a little harsh. The developers of those fine apps have not been getting a “free ride”. On the contrary, their apps have made the iPhone a more attractive device.
Absolutely! Dropbox and Evernote will be on all of my devices (iOS, MacOS and Windows) for the forseeable future. There are still quite a few people without iOS devices out there and many who will not be able to get Lion, so I’m glad high-quality alternatives exist!
I must have missed something during the keynote.
Unless you want to call email the “productivity”, with the imap protocol already years available to sync the mailbox status on different devices (not brand limited), all that I saw is a highly resource expensive data redundancy mechanism that can barely be controlled.
Office 365 and Google apps are a completely different cloud concept. (no judgment on better or worse)
With the lack of control, I will consider seriously if I am willing to subscribe to iCloud. For me, the different devices (phone, pad, pod) have completely different purposes. Therefore I have little need to get everything synced to each of the devices. And the part that I really would love to see, iWork documents synced between my iPad and my iMac, was not presented as an option.
“And the part that I really would love to see, iWork documents synced between my iPad and my iMac, was not presented as an option.”
Yes, you did miss that most important part, because Steve made it very clear, at least to me and everyone else I talked to, that the iCloud would allow you to do just that. Create and save a pages, numbers or keynote doc on your mac running Lion and that doc is immediately available on icloud from any iPod, iPhone or iPad running IOS5 sharing the same appleID. That simple, and that elegant.
You can do that today with Dropbox and DropDAV. It’s not magical, but it works.
Yes, I use Dropbox too but I hate having to open GoodReader or the Dropbox app and then launch my document from there. What the iCloud offers is a much better and seamless way. You won’t need to even think about where your files reside. They will just be there. Google, Amazon, and MS will never be able to do this. Not for free anyway.
Use iWork.com. It’s about to become redundant with iCloud, but it does what you want. It doesn’t push the document among the devices, but using it is as convenient as accessing the photo stream in iPhoto; your docs are one button away.
‘And the part that I really would love to see, iWork documents synced between my iPad and my iMac, was not presented as an option.’
Dude….?
‘I must have missed something during the keynote.’
Yup
Do you really think Apple isn’t going to give you choices on what syncs to iCloud and what doesn’t? Come on, get real.
iCloud isn’t even going to be fully available until this fall, so everyone needs to cool their jets, stop gossiping like little ladies, and wait for Apple to release more details. THEN decide if you want to use iCloud or not, and bitch appropriately.
All this FUD and jumping to baseless conclusions is wearing me out.
I agree entirely with Dude McFarland – what ever happened to data security? When I started using DropBox, the first thing I did was encrypt all data in a DMG, then synced the DMG, not the raw data. And even that makes me a touch uncomfortable.
Anything sent “into the cloud” is at far more risk of theft than data on your home machine. Until ludicrously secure data is the norm in the cloud, I’ll be avoiding it or taking additional personal steps of my own before sending it into no man’s land.
Really? Do you run your own mail server from your home computer? Where do you think all your email is kept? In the Cloud. I don’t think you realize just how much of your information is already kept in the cloud. Apple has been running these “cloud” services for a decade now, and as far as I can recall, have never had a security breach.
As a matter of fact, I do run my own mail server and have been for more than 10 years. It’s not really all that hard to do. With lion server available for $50, we can all run our own servers, but somehow I doubt that will happen.
What scares me is just how many small companies or business professionals have hotmail.com or gmail.com email addresses and expect me to send them confidential info.
Apple now owns the term ‘cloud’ I know the service is called ‘iCloud’ but people will hear cloud and think of Apple.
‘skydrive’ and ‘google docs’ mean very little to the average person. (the average person does not read MDN)
We’ve all been using the “cloud” for a long, long time. We just never really thought of it as such. I really think the timing is right for this to go big-time and Apple is positioned extremely well to deliver the cloud service in ways that others simply can’t.
I don’t see the cloud completely replacing the desktop drive anytime soon and I don’t think Apple is really expecting that to happen either. This is more about convenience and simplifying the way people store and manage their content and certain types of data. I doubt the Pentagon or the State Department is really going to use cloud services anytime soon either.
Overall, I do think this is quite significant. Apple is again taking the initiative although this concept has been around for quite a while. It’s like the iPod, iPhone and the iPad in that the technologies for such devices have been around long before they came to being. It took Apple to package ’em all up in a way that reached the masses.
I’m betting Apple will succeed again in that manner with iCloud but not as a real revenue or profit generator on its own, but as a service that adds even more value to the entire iOS/iTunes/Mac ecosystem. The gap between Apple and the competition is just growing wider and wider by the day.
Having been a Mac user since the late-80’s and having lived through the dark ages of the 90’s, it’s really amazing to see what Apple is achieving right now and how they’ve turned the table on Microsoft. It really is a sweet thing to see Microsoft get pummeled by Apple and on the defensive – cowering and retreating from the assault.
Back in ’96, such a scenario was simply unimaginable. Well, Apple just can’t relent and they’ve got to keep applying the pressure. Also, Apple is a consumer electronics company and doesn’t need to be on the bleeding edge as far as introducing the latest gee-whiz technologies to the masses.
Let the competition do the “field R&D” for the Apple-hatin’ nerd crowd who populate the geek sites. Apple is all about milking every last ounce of existing mainstream technologies before adopting something new for the masses. This is yet another way that Apple is playing the competition like a drum.
Good review – there are a few recent changes as of June 2011:
You get 5sGB of space with the FREE version, but now there is no restriction to the number of computers you can sync/backup (up from 2).
It gives you the ability to upload and sync any folder on your computer.
It is the only service that offers such a broad device and OS support with apps for iPhone/iPad, BlackBerry, Android, Symbian, not to mention your computer!
Also if you use the below referral code you get a bonus 500MB extra on top of your Free 5GB!
https://www.sugarsync.com/referral?rf=tbtp0asbw9pt
Hope it helps someone.
I think there is: up to 10 computers.
When MS decided to bundle/give IE away free since it could not compete at any price with NetScape ($70 for commercial use) it got them into legal trouble. If it weren’t for Google’s free offerings, Apple’s iCloud action might get them into similar legal troubles.
I hope the developers can continue to exceed Apple’s offerings.
This is exactly what I have been thinking. While others seem to only see what is in the surface. This guy gets the real impact that Apple’s newly announced initiatives will have. Sure, the others will once again attempt to emulate this the fastest way possible, but Apple, once again is several years ahead of it’s competition.
Get ready for the iDeluge.
An impressive traverse by all of the pros and cons of Apple’s smarts.