
For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation - sandipc
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/06/10/businessinsider-apple-icloud-microsoft-cloud-2011-6.DTL
======
jasonkolb
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 knows how to sell products to consumers, and
Microsoft doesn't. Microsoft and Google both suffer from the same disease,
they try to sell a product, not address a need. They might be the same thing
in the end, and Microsoft might have even gotten there first, but Apple really
_gets_ marketing.

~~~
raganwald
I don't agree that this is about "getting" marketing. You may not mean it this
way, but when people describe Apple as being a marketing company, the
implication is that given the exact same product, Apple would succeed where
Microsoft would fail. The truth is, Apple doesn't build the exact same
products as Microsoft. What Apple does is what Dropbox did: They take a
product and build what people actually want. People want A, B, and C, so Apple
builds that. People don't care about technology X, Y or Z, so Apple doesn't
build that or hides it under the covers.

[http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-
tha...](http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-
programs-with-similar-functionality)

People want their stuff to just be there. People actually don't care about the
cloud or whatever, they just want their documents and their presentations and
their calendar and their music to just be there for them on every device they
use.

So Apple built that. I don't think this is about presenting the idea
differently, I think it's about actually _doing_ the idea differently.

I go back to Joel Spolsky: When talking about Architects, he said: _Your
typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-
peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the
architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely
missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a
song and listen to it right away._

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html>

Remember that? Apple does, because with the iTunes Music Store, people could
type the name of a song and listen to it right away, and Apple has made
billions of dollars making that work simply and easily.

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.

~~~
recoiledsnake
I think the point was about non-obvious features. Lets take the Aero snap
feature in Windows 7. How many would know that it is possible to drag a window
to the sides and the top etc. and have it snap into place for split screen
view or to maximize? Most of the people who know would be either geeks, or
someone who saw someone else do it or discovered it by accident.

Contrast that to Apple's features, which are demoed in keynotes by Jobs and
watched by a BIG percentage of Apple users. This is the reason that Apple is
an ultra secret company with very high penalties for leaking things out. The
hype that precedes every conference, with all the guessing etc. keeps Apple in
the headlines and in people's minds. That's what people mean when they say
Apple is a marketing company. Contrast that to Microsoft, how many people
would watch them tout new features? They do make good stuff, but without their
marketing, sales would be a lot slower.

~~~
marknutter
Give me a break, the only people watching these keynotes are geeks.

~~~
simonh
My wife is a nurse. She has no real interest in technology, though she loves
her iPhone. When a new iPhone or new major version of iOS comes out she always
asks me about because all her nursey mates on the ward chat about it.

~~~
ndmccormack
Agreed. A fellow co-worker, who doesn't even have an iPhone, loves watching
Steve Jobs present keynotes due to his presentation style and they way
he/apple demo's new technology. While she may be a producer in a digital
agency she is certainly not tech savvy and not trying to keep up with the
latest apple news.

 _edit_ grammer

------
ezy
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 consumers today, feels like using
a work tool at home, rather than something more personal. The way it
communicates with you is like a colleague, not a friend. There are features
that are the same as equivalent features on other operating systems, sometimes
better, sometimes worse. But they are designed to make you "more productive",
not to help you. Even when the mechanism is the same, it feels off as a
personal device...

So, it's unsurprising that M advertises the Cloud heavily and it just feels
like a "team-building" video, whereas A takes advantage of M's "to the cloud"
ads building awareness to do a small press push and a brief description in a
presentation and it's perceived as the second-coming.

And here's the thing, the "to the cloud" idea as marketing is a great idea!
It's funny, and totally memorable -- but the Microsoft brand just kills it
dead.

~~~
msbarnett
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.

~~~
mparr4
Yes. It seems that at some level, the degree of innovation is often similar
and the difference between Apple and Microsoft is more a matter of design
(which in my opinion is no small factor) and marketing than anything else.

------
ChuckMcM
I have to agree with the Chronicle's basic point which is that Microsoft has
talked about "cloud computing" for a long time and not delivered anything.
Even a bad anything.

Its a very good example of the Innovator's Dilemma [1] in action, you've got
some smart folks who see a future problem, and start creating interesting
technology and vision around that problem, and then the reality that the
company doesn't "need" it now gets in the way of pushing it from concept into
the product stream. So it never gets to the 'commit' point where everyone is
on board with shipping it to customers and trying to support it.

Why? Because that is "risky" but just tweaking the current product stream and
adding a few features or targeting an adjacent market is much lower "risk."

As Clayton points out in his book innovation always loses in the 'risk'
evaluation. So companies that are 'managed' always strive for optimum returns,
and since you can't predict the future they are risk averse. Companies that
are 'lead' on the other hand have the capability to ignore the risk in order
to get to the rewards on the other side.

Startups have the risk meter pegged so it doesn't enter into their management
decisions, instead they are focussed on execution and they flame out or
succeed as they will and when they succeed they clarify the risk around their
idea (if it flops the managers can pat themselves on the back for avoiding
that land mine, if it takes off the managers wring their hands and wonder if
they should have been able to forecast that success.

I think Apple may have combined some protocols and services into a useful
adjunct to their product strategy. We won't really know until later when we
see how it fairs. From the presentations and markitecture that Microsoft has
espoused it seems like they could have done something similar but they didn't.
It does reflect badly on how they are being managed, and that buck does stop
at Ballmer. So it will be interesting to see how this affects his future
there.

[1] <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060521996>

~~~
contextfree
Huh? They've delivered lots of stuff. Some bad stuff, some good stuff. The
real problem is the lack of cohesion.

~~~
georgemcbay
I agree. It is the lack of cohesion that is killing them in the 'cloud'. Not
just in the sense that there isn't a unified UX for all their stuff (though
that is also true), but they are so non-unified that they often have multiple
products that do the same basic things, causing end-user confusion and quite
simply too many choices. [eg. Sync, Live Mesh, SkyDrive... which is right for
'me' if I'm a non-techie and don't understand the subtle differences in each?
Who knows... I'll just use Dropbox!]

(FWIW I'm a big fan of Windows Live Mesh, but I've known more than a handful
of non-techies who were just confused by it when I suggested it due to the
related-but-different products that pop up when they are trying to learn more
about it).

This does seem to be a problem they are aware of given the unification work
they've done with the products I used as an example, but they still have a
very long way to go on this.

------
paulitex
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 iCloud to live up to the hype as much as anyone. But at this point the
only thing we should be calling a success is the awesome power of the Jobs
Distortion Field. He's the tech equivalent of a superstar athlete in their
prime and the top of their game - evidenced by articles like these.

~~~
jolan
> vapourware

There's a beta. Register and download it.

~~~
biturd
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?

~~~
erickt
10.3 should work. Go to the Preferences, then Store, and select Automatic
Downloads for Music/Apps/Books. Also, you can go to the Apple Store and under
Quick Links, you'll find a Purchased link. That'll let you re-download any
Music/Apps/Books. It's not really cloud-y yet, but it's a start.

------
JunkDNA
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's DNA to ruffle the corporate
customer feathers too much (whereas I get the sense Google and Apple almost
take pleasure in it).

The biggest issue for MS isn't just that iCloud might be an embarrassment.
It's a full on attack on the Windows monopoly. Apple telegraphed this in the
WWDC presentation when they showed the stats on the numbers of people who
don't own a personal computer (either Mac or Windows) in different countries
around the world. The combination of iCloud + iPad means that the iPad can be
a standalone device. This could potentially be huge in markets like China. How
many SharePoint licenses does MS have to sell to make up for ceding a
significant portion of the untapped Chinese PC market to the iPad?

~~~
elehack
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."

~~~
Hoff
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.

------
programminggeek
You know, the funny thing is that as nerds we tend to look at iCloud and say,
"well I can already do that with Dropbox and Amazon Cloud Player". It's not
revolutionary to us.

Yet, can you imagine how many sales Apple will be able to take from Microsoft
just by saying, "all your files are backed up and synced automatically between
your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Mac devices." No more worrying about
backups, losing your photos, or losing your music.

Up until now GeekSquad and other computer repair businesses made a killing
just on moving files between machines when you replace them or recovering lost
files.

Apple is getting this right because it helps them sell more devices. Microsoft
is getting it wrong because it would cost them a lot and wouldn't sell more
copies of Windows or Office.

~~~
jwr
Actually, they were very careful to never use the word 'sync'. You don't
"sync" anything, the files are just there, on all your devices, always up to
date.

I think that is an important point.

~~~
wildmXranat
Yes, it's a new HTTP method ...

    
    
        THERE HTTP/1.1

------
hussam
Good god! Isn't it too early to prejudge iCloud? It will likely get a lot of
users (it's mostly free and automatically integrated into their products after
all), and it will likely succeed given mobility trends. But it is also too
early to judge the future success or failure of Microsoft's cloud offering
(though from what I'm seeing now, I guess it is likely to succeed as well).

At this point in time, Apple's success in the "software+cloud" model is the
same as that of Microsoft (in that neither have seen mass wide adoption).

The use of "humiliation" in the title is an obvious exaggeration. But I guess
without such title, that article wouldn't end up on the front page of HN.

~~~
ltamake
It'll get a lot of users because a lot of people own iDevices. The product can
completely suck and people will still use it because it's Apple and unlike
MobileMe, it's free. Microsoft doesn't understand the cult following that
Apple has.

~~~
sjs
Apple is far bigger than their cult following. If you attribute their success
to the cult you are only fooling yourself. A cult alone doesn't buy
200,000,000+ iOS devices.

People generally do not use Apple products that suck, not everything they do
takes off. They are just vocal about things that take off and very quiet on
the rest, e.g. dismissing AppleTV as a "hobby" even though they clearly want
it to take off.

You can attribute Apple's success to marketing, cult, whatever you want but at
the end of the day Apple makes good products and puts a lot of care into them,
and that's why they sell.

~~~
buyx
They do put a lot of care into their products, but their cult following does
seem to play an important part in protecting their image. There's another
thread on the front page of HN where people are describing how their Apple
laptop power adapters burst into flames.

I am typing this on an iPad that periodically loses its wifi connection.
Googling the problem yields dozens of complaints about this issue. Apple
supporters on these forums blame wifi routers, even though the iPad is the
only device with these issues.

I like the App Store, but, by default, I can't buy games on my iPad - why?
Because I live in South Africa, and unlike every other device manufacturer
with an app store here Apple hasn't applied for self rating games, which,
according to most sources, is a straightforward process. Again, Apple and its
supporters don't bother mentioning this little detail.

Apple does put a lot of care into their devices, but I also think there is a
tendency to deny issues, to brush them over and to rely on the cult to impart
an aura of invincibility.

~~~
sjs
Apple is not invincible, look at the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco.

I agree that it's bad that they deny most problems instead of being
transparent about them. It can be extremely frustrating, you file a Radar
ticket and then it goes into a black hole and the only feedback you might get
is that someone else had the problem too. They are by no means perfect and
neither are their products, I didn't mean to imply anything like that.

------
flamingbuffalo
Seems like this just is echoing Gruber from earlier this week:

"But Google’s vision is about software you run in a web browser. Apple’s is
about native apps you run on devices. Apple is as committed to native apps —
on the desktop, tablet, and handheld — as it has ever been."

<http://daringfireball.net/2011/06/demoted>

~~~
sandipc
Interesting, I must have missed that earlier this week. Great concise summary
of the long term philosophies of the two companies. Thanks.

~~~
stanleydrew
if you haven't read this post from Paul Buchheit it sheds a lot of light on
how the two philosophies might not be all that different:
<http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/12/cloud-os.html>

------
woan
I was going to say something about this being flame bait, but I went back to
MS's marketing material and it does seem like their vision marketing is at
great odds from their execution:
[http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/software-
plus-...](http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/software-plus-
services-full-story.aspx)

Unless by services they means software updates, CDDB updates, and downloading
Office templates...

------
dkl
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 bandwidth.

~~~
Lozzer
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.

------
gallerytungsten
Google 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.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
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.

~~~
technoslut
Web apps became popular because the desktop was too unwieldy for the average
person to deal with. The browser was easy to deal with in comparison. The
situation with iOS is completely different. The main advantage that web apps
have is sharing and collaboration but that is easier to accomplish than a web
app being as smooth and looking native to the average user.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
The main advantage of web apps is ubiquity and ease. The former is of extreme
importance when it comes to the cloud. If a user has to think about whether
they can access a document at a later time, the cloud is failing them. If
iCloud is to succeed it has to convince consumers that ubiquity is not that
important. That's a huge thing to overcome and I feel it is being brushed
aside in these iCloud praising articles.

------
Yhippa
I feel that if Microsoft had taken Bill Gates' book "The Road Ahead" and
implemented a lot of the ideas in the book they could have preempted Apple and
Google by several years! What's amazing to me is that the book is over 15
years old and just now a lot of what he mentioned in there with respect to the
cloud is being implemented. Not by his company but Apple.

------
ajennings
Yes, "the cloud" is a vision that Microsoft has proclaimed and never been able
to implement. It really required re-thinking the operating system. Microsoft's
operating system was just too big and unwieldy to be re-engineered in this
way. If Apple truly has pulled it off, a large part of the reason is that
their OS was much more malleable and could handle this kind of thing.

But I think iCloud is more than "annoying" to Google. It shows Apple is
competing with them head-to-head for cloud customers. And if there are network
effects and permanent lock-in, then this is a very, very important battle.

Google really has written an operating system where you can take your data and
configuration with you wherever you go. But you have to switch to a new
computer and operating system and a completely different way of thinking!

Apple hasn't truly re-written the operating system the way Google has. They
have made some important strides to helping people get their most important
data into the cloud. Then they announce iCloud, over-hype it, and hope that
the reality distortion field does the rest.

The big advantage that iCloud has, though, is Apple can leverage their entire
installed user base. Millions of people can begin to use iCloud NOW, for $29!
That's orders of magnitude simpler than having to buy a new computer. It's not
a complete cloud solution like ChromeOS, but it might be good enough for now.
And with Apple, the transition will be gradual and the learning curve will be
easy.

So I think Google should be very worried about iCloud...

------
6ren
Microsoft makes money from the desktop. The cloud threatens this, the current
incarnation of the internet.

Over 10 years ago, the internet was supposed to undermine Microsoft, lead by
Java. There was even a set-top box, that downloaded everything from the
network (sound familiar?)

There was a joke about Java's ideal "write once, run everywhere", as "write
once, debug everywhere". A similar joke about network-based computing's ideal
of "access anywhere" is "no access anywhere". It's interesting that Apple's
approach is _not_ network centric.

    
    
        1. The network is reliable.
        2. Latency is zero.
        3. Bandwidth is infinite.
        4. The network is secure.
        5. Topology doesn't change.
        6. There is one administrator.
        7. Transport cost is zero.
        8. The network is homogeneous.
    

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing)

Of course, Java has basically achieved its aim. And, one day, the network will
be good enough - when it's as reliable as the bus in your PC (or, more
accurately, as reliably as it needs to be for specific tasks).

~~~
j_baker
What gives you the idea that the network isn't reliable now? It's been around
for what, 3 or 4 decades? Maybe 10 years ago you'd have been correct, but
nowadays the internet's been pretty well broken in.

And cloud computing, while new (at least in name), has built billion dollar
businesses like Amazon and Google.

~~~
6ren
A review of Google's Chrome OS netbook noted poor network reception affected
everything - even starting up. Of course, that's the mobile network.

Maybe you're right. I was thinking of the Amazon outages, but they weren't due
to the network.

------
kefs
>> _All of the cloud computing services Google offers to consumers, like
email, word processing and spreadsheets, happen within the browser._

Factually, this is incorrect. All of the services are _available_ within the
browser, but there have been native mobile apps available for
gmail/docs/calendar for quite some time now.

------
5h
the word cloud appears 43 times on that page ... Larry Ellisons rant
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOEFXaWHpp>) is more apt then ever.

~~~
bradleyland
I get pretty annoyed by its generic use, but I'm hopeful that we're seeing a
narrowing of the term here.

Larry Ellison is right, we've had the "cloud" forever -- the network is the
cloud -- but I think there's a good fit for the term "cloud" in the user
space. "Cloud" describes a user experience. It's something that laymen can
latch on to and begin to identify with an experience. While it abstracts
detail, it's useful for marketing. The user may think:

"When I access Google Apps from this computer, my environment and experience
are exactly the same as it is on any other computer. This is cloud computing."

The same would would apply for iCloud. Any device registered under your
account works interchangeably.

Operating in the cloud means interchangeability of some underlying component
that users are used to having to think about. E.g., "Oh, I'm not at my
computer, so I can't access that document."

As an industry, we should try to narrow our usage the term to refer to
services that deliver a location and device agnostic view of the _entire_ end-
user experience.

------
nhannah
Microsoft does poor advertising. Office 2011 has a pretty sick cloud
integration although you need to be running windows to use it properly.
<http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive> Skydrive. And Office 365 is
even further along apparently although I am not a Beta user. I would argue
M$FT is ahead of both apple and google, if you run windows and have a win7
phone your integration is pretty insane at this point, toss in an xbox + live
and everything is integrated really well. It's just not so cool to talk M$FT
as it isn't as shiny. I have a Mac now and have for 6 years, for the 4 years
before that I went to a high school with all macs, just trying to point out I
am not biased. People just seem to want to love apple and hate msft and as a
user of both I don't get why other than "apple's cool."

On a similar note, many people buy macs because they "don't have viruses"
which has to do with market share not that they aren't vulnerable as we all
know. Am I the only one who believes the Mac App Store is just the beginning
of them closing off the system so that in the case they reach a substantial
market share they can avoid virus control by making sure you download directly
from them? If M$FT told dev's you can only put software on our machines if you
give us 30% ppl would go nuts.

Just saying, the fanboyism keeps many users from being critical, in the end
they are a company, question every move they make as with google and M$FT.

------
tct
Microsoft 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.

------
Splines
Microsoft had a shot at this with Hailstorm[1], it's too bad that it was
killed.[2]

[1] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/bb263932(v=vs.85).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/bb263932\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/business/technology-
micros...](http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/business/technology-microsoft-
has-quietly-shelved-its-internet-persona-service.html)

------
westajay
This reminds me of when Microsoft was hyping touch user interface features in
the run-up to the Windows 7 launch (without anything tangible in the field).
Then Apple released multi-touch gesture pads on their laptops and furthered
the reach of iOS.

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dynosaur
Ubuntu One, while not possessed of all the bells and whistles that Apple likes
to hang on things, has already been hard at work in the cloud.

------
Apocryphon
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.

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sganesh
My 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.

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jccodez
I think iCloud will be great for Microsoft, they are including vista and
windows 7 in icloud. I know lots of people with PCs and iphones/ipads.

~~~
mnutt
Then if it takes off, Microsoft will be locked into a competitor's platform.
If someone's using Windows + iCloud, what's to keep them from switching to the
(presumably better, more integrated) Mac + iCloud?

~~~
ltamake
Price, converting all their Windows programs to Mac versions (or finding an
equivalent), and the fact that they may not want a Mac. People I talk to own a
PC because Apple doesn't offer the choices they want in a computer.

------
alphadog
Google _is_ the "cloud".

Apple gives the "cloud" branding and a logo.

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napierzaza
MS has been humiliated by Apple for over a decade now. Bill Gates wrote an
entire book about the home of the future. And how digital devices would rule
it. Who came across and actually did that? iPod, iPhone, iPad and the AppleTV
are all very successful and the "digital hub" is basically the same thing that
MS has been saying.

MS has been doing a lot of catch-up "also-ran" devices trying to do what Apple
has done. It's unfortunate that they could never leverage their huge lead to
make it happen.

~~~
DanI-S
Microsoft need to do more of what they did with XBox - spin off a smaller,
more agile brand that doesn't invoke the image of dusty CRT monitors and
lumbering corporate IT.

Apple's brand identity works for selling consumer products, but nobody really
finds value in the fact that their music player or phone was branded
Microsoft. Their brand's strength isn't in consumer tech.

Apple didn't manage this by standing still, either. Their brand used to be
Apple Computer, and their logo was a cheesy rainbow. That doesn't cut it with
21st century consumers, so they redrew their image.

~~~
jamesaguilar
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 downvotes are coming from . . . people who think setting up MS home
sharing is easy? (Maybe people who have never done it -- I have.) Or people
who genuinely believe branding is more important than the product being
branded? I have no use for either of these perspectives but I am curious.

~~~
DanI-S
I'd argue that, through failure to gain consumer traction, Microsoft just
haven't been able to create the network of tightly related devices that Apple
has. Thanks to their consumer focus, Apple have an entire platform sharing the
same operating system, individual devices developed somewhat in harmony.
Microsoft, attempting to corner several markets separately, has competing
teams working on entirely unrelated products whose connectedness is
incidental.

There was a Steve Jobs keynote from the 1990s posted the other day in which he
outlined his vision of a networked device ecosystem. It is very significant
that they built the line of devices before they tried to market the backbone.
Microsoft was thinking about this concept for just as long, but they never
really had the platform.

Edit: To reply, the key is that product follows from brand and marketing. The
reason Apple's products are connected so well is that they're all targeted at
one market. Microsoft target several, so their products are developed in
bubbles.

Edit: To reply again, I think we may be arguing the same thing, but our
disagreement is in the reasoning. I believe that Microsoft's lack of a
coherent product is due to an attempt to sell their vision to several markets
at once; it makes connecting the dots very difficult. Apple's (assumed)
success lies in their coherent targeting of a single market, through their
strong consumer brand. Both of them are selling a vision; Apple get to amplify
this by designing products that fit with their brand.

It's a shame we can't continue this conversation further due to the weird
commenting system.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Right. Like I said, the problem is not branding but that Microsoft's products
do not play well together like Apple's TV box, speakers, wifi base stations,
automatic backup devices, phones, computers, and music players, all of which
hook up to each other basically automatically (all you have to do is enter
your iTunes account info).

To reply to your edit: I think that brand and marketing come from product. You
cannot market a feature that does not exist, nor can your brand gain a
reputation for an attribute that your products do not have. But underneath,
product, brand, and marketing all stem from vision and priorities. Apple and
MS shared the same vision, but Apple made this part of that vision a priority.
Therefore their products reflect it, their brand gains a reputation for it,
and their marketing can highlight the features that support the vision.
Microsoft made this part of their vision a talking point, thus their products
don't reflect it, their brand lacks the reputation, and any marketing that
tries to highlight connectedness of devices rings hollow.

------
recoiledsnake
Microsoft has a marketing problem, they have a lot of cloud services like
Skydrive, Live Mesh etc. but are not able to grab the attention of consumers
or media like Jobs is able to, on stage.

However, Windows 8 seems to be coming with a ton of integrated cloud features
so I don't know about the humiliation part.I just don't see that their
marketshare is affected more than 1% specifically due to the cloud services in
Lion.

~~~
danieldk
Taking all Apple's emphasis on design, marketing, etc., aside. It starts very
simple: Steve Jobs looks like a sympathetic guy on stage that we could easily
emphasize with. Steve Ballmer looks, let's put it bluntly, unsympathetic and
rude.

This difference is clearly visible in every fiber of marketing material from
both companies. Apple marketing feels friendly and fresh, while Microsoft's
tends to feel aggressive. Sometimes Microsoft attempts to copy Apple's
marketing style, but it feels faked or superficial.

Don't underestimate company's 'soul'.

~~~
tomkarlo
I don't think the issue here is that Jobs looks frail while Ballmer looks like
he's been eating for two. People aren't buying tens of millions of iPhones out
of pity.

Apple has made its recent success off developing and marketing products that
consumers want to buy and that make them happy to use (look at how many people
by an iPod or iPhone and go on to become Mac owners.) Microsoft mostly makes
it way off of enterprise sales and bundling with PCs. That's fine, but it
doesn't tend to lead to a culture that creates products that end consumers get
really juiced about.

