Clutch surveyed small businesses in the US to determine how many use cloud storage and to identify the most popular and satisfactory service providers in the small and medium business (SMB) market.
The survey revealed three significant findings:
• Nearly half, 48 percent, of small businesses do not use cloud storage.
• Small businesses identified Dropbox as the most popular cloud storage service, followed by Google Drive, Apple iCloud, and Microsoft OneDrive.
• Apple iCloud received the highest Net Promoter Score (NPS), a standard measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty, followed by Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive.
The full survey included 744 respondents who were employed full-time by firms with between 11 and 1,000 employees and held an associate position or higher, such as manager, vice president, C-level executive, or president/CEO. The survey was conducted throughout October 2015.
Small businesses identified Apple iCloud as the most satisfactory cloud storage service, with an NPS of 62. Dropbox, with a score of 54, Google Drive, with a score of 50, and Microsoft OneDrive, with a score of 45, represent the top four most satisfactory cloud storage services. These NPS scores are based on the rankings given by the 42 small business employees who selected Apple iCloud as the service provider with which they were most familiar, 84 who selected Dropbox, 64 who selected Google Drive, and 40 who selected Microsoft OneDrive.
Source: Clutch
MacDailyNews Take: It’s very, very nice to see the oft-maligned iCloud come out on top in terms of user satisfaction. While cloud services can suffer outages at times, iCloud has come a long way in a short time. Excellent job, Apple!
So it seems they all suck, but Apple’s iCould sucks the least. Maybe it’s just an idea that’s not really ready for prime time but everyone feels they need to jump in anyway so they’re not left out?
Me = equally D.I. Gusted, Esq.
GeeWhiz tech that nobody bothers to do very well.
Oh and Backblaze: I still hate you.
Interesting that all we hear on here is abuse of iCloud yet for those that most need a reliable service and who aren’t trolls its apparently the best despite bud ones as we are also told by so many on here isn’t Apples forte. Oh well no doubt they will be Echoing Des Gustings stance to defend their perceptions rather than give praise where a modicum of it is due. Oh well at least I no longer have to question why I seem to have a pretty seemless and reliable experience with it anyway.
Me too, I’ve never had an issue.
Appleinsider, Nov 17, 2015
Apple’s online store services, Maps suffer widespread outage
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/11/17/apples-online-store-services-maps-suffer-widespread-outage
In short: If you want things to “just work”, then don’t rely on anyone’s cloud.
Some people require more reliability than any cloud will ever offer. That is why Apple needs to stop pushing iCloud and always-connected functions so damn hard and get back to guaranteeing the best user experience. If some users opt for iCloud services, great. But for those who don’t want it, then Apple should serve them the experience they enjoyed RELIABLY and SEAMLESSLY in 2009.
The Cloud sucks most of the time, so Apple’s decision to gut its professional standalone applications and dumb down the Mac with iOS-like dependencies in order to sell rental computing is really pathetic.
What’s even funnier is that Apple doesn’t even serve all its own data. It outsources huge portions of its iCloud to Akamai, Amazon, and others. The services it does itself, Apple relies on HP hardware.
So let’s get this straight — if Apple doesn’t even have to hardware and software to provide the Cloud functions it sells today, why should consumers rent server space from Apple? Increasingly Apple has become a storefront selling a fashion/lifestyle. If you want true reliability, you have to revert back to wires and Snow Leopard. If you want cheap storage and are willing to forego reliability and speed, then cut out the Apple middleman and just rent backup space from Amazon for much cheaper.
Apple needs to stop attempting to force consumers to conform to its offerings — that’s what every other tech company does. When Apple does it — and now it’s doing it with hardware and software as well as its services — then longtime users like myself seriously question the value proposition that Apple now gives us. A cloud-free Hackintosh Snow Leopard laptop is looking more and more attractive all the time.
BS
All things do down. Hackers can bring parts of the Internet down, your HD can crash and YOU will be “down” until you restore from backup. The cloud is made of the SAME components as the rest of the Internet. The cloud WILL evolve to be just as robust as other parts of the Internet and way more reliable than your home equipment. Time and evolution will do that.
I have never met an IT department that was as competent as I was. If you want to outsource your storage and trust that someone else takes your privacy and security seriously (which they don’t promise in their legal agreements), then great, GO AHEAD.
I’m with the skeptical Paul on this one. The Cloud is not going to be reliable and fast enough for me, ever. You are reliant on too many other things. It’s easy and cheap to build redundancy and real-time updates in your own home. It’s also easier than ever to securely host your own website or file server from your own home/office too. The only reason Apple offers rental computing is because it’s not a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses company and every MBA marketing twit’s wet dream is to get cash flow via automated monthly subscriptions. The fanboy users won’t even know what a rip off the Cloud is!
I agree the focus on cloud being the primary access rather than an option to local data storage will continue to degrade UX as long as cloud services are unreliable.. The best option now would be local data storage when disconnected and sync when reconnected. Apple can take a lesson from how Google Maps and Google Translate still work offline. Not completely mind you, but enough to remain useful till connection is reestablished.
I don’t see many people complaining about iCloud in terms of having issues, instead I see people complaining about iCloud in terms of lacking features that others have. If you’re in a situation where you need selective sync, iCloud may work flawlessly, but you’re better off with Dropbox. The same goes for things like cross-platform compatibility.
I like iCloud better than any other I’ve tried… None are wha’ I’d call great, but hey, we’re dealing with the internet, ISPs, etc…
I wonder what the results would have been if they included employees from all levels instead of just associate and above..
ICloud is only suitable for VERY small businesses with VERY simple storage requirements. The limitations make it unusable in most environments.
Onedrive is better but MS still just don’t get user interfaces. Unsynchronised folders don’t appear at all in the file system so you can’t see what you don’t have, and to find something you don’t have MS throws you to the web and their very messy UI. They need to show every folder and file in the file system with a cloud icon if it’s unsynchronised.
In my one-person small business there is vastly more stuff that iCloud does not support at all than the few file formats which iCloud is happy to store, albeit in silos rather than by project (does anyone at Apple do any work?). It does sync my passwords though.
Really simple documents can be constructed in Pages. Sometimes the PDF versions of these can be stored in the pages silo, but other times cannot. But any complex documents require MS Word and that means one-drive as far as I know.
So these happy iCloud users? Perhaps ignorance is happiness here…
I love iCloud and everything that comes with it. Works great nowadays compared to it first year or so. All my iOS and Mac devices happily sync each other. I’m coming from eWorld days to iTools and on. I still think iTools was really a stupid name. lol
So. I don’t use much in the way of Pages, Numbers, Keynote or apps that store stuff in iCloud. I guess my photos are stored there sometimes, Notes works well across devices. These are hardly critical to anything I need. But I can’t move files between devices, like my MacBook and my iMac at work. I can’t store my choice of files there. I can’t share stuff like I could with MobileMe. I have nothing comparable to iDisk.
So my question is what is it that people like about iCloud? What do you use it for? I also wonder how it can be compared with Dropbox or Box or such where you can store your choice of files and access them anywhere.