[coldtea]

>Google and Amazon both understand the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple

I really doubt this. Google yes. Amazon no.

What has Amazon did that shows it "gets" the Cloud?

It has its one (and that's it) highly succesful store front (which is like a Google that only offered the search service). That's is, as far as the Cloud goes for Amazon.

As for AWS, the do get cloud infrastructure and services to developers. But that's not the Cloud (like CISCO is not the Internet), and it's a far cry from "getting" the Cloud itself, and being able to create cloud services people use.

Amazon can sell you the infrastructure to create Twitter, ot the new Gmail, or whatever yourself. But they don't really create those things themselves.

[malandrew]

There are different layers of the cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

The only layer Apple gets is SaaS and really only for its own apps/services. Apple keeps trying to do PaaS, but the anti-decentralization and specifically wall-garden approach of a seemless experience across all your Apple devices, but a sometimes intentionally crippled experience across other devices you own and a certainly deficient experience with devices owned by others with whom you may want to share an experience, Apple will always be second fiddle.

They might be able to get somewhere with HealthKit, since AFAICT, that may be largely a single-player experience (at least for a while). HomeKit on the other hand is a different story. The moment you move to a household with more than one person, they will need to either play nicely with other devices not their own or become increasingly seen as irrelevant. HomeKit only working with Apple devices is a dealbreaker for every home with at least one resident using a non-Apple device. Now that Android has a comparable experience to Apple, that's a fairly common phenomenon.

Google understands PaaS and SaaS.

Amazon understands IaaS and PaaS.

[anko]

I think Apple understands both PaaS (the new icloud stuff in ios8/yosemite) and SaaS (most of their offerings which were decent up until now).

I don't think IaaS really comes into this discussion at all - If they did it or didn't do it, it wouldn't matter because it doesn't change how many phones or devices they sell. IaaS is targeted at a niche - companies/people who can afford server admins.

Calling apple's experience "intentionally crippled" is also disingenuous. Maybe you can find a few examples ie. storage size costs, but generally, they are trading off user simplicity and security against user control.

Apple's not alone in this regard either. You might say Google "intentionally cripple" their open source version of android: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-....

What I find more appalling is that google pretended to be open to get a marketplace advantage.

As for Homekit - can't you just buy home automation devices that adopt more than one standard? I would love for apple to open up more of their new apis to other platforms, but what do they do when an android device's insecurity causes someone's house to be hacked?

[malandrew]

Providing only device APIs and few to no network APIs counts as intentionally crippled in my book. But as you said, Google does this as well, but not nearly to the same degree as Apple.

Google doesn't cripple the end-developers, it cripples the OEMs and their ability to take Android in other directions. This sucks because it hurts diversity of ideas that can succeed in the market. I don't like either Google's or Apple's approach here, but Google's is the lesser of two evils.

[drewcrawford]

I don't think you understand HomeKit, or Apple's view of it.

What's important to Apple is that you have a good user experience. As this applies to HomeKit, there are a few important requirements: battery life, and security/privacy. Keep in mind we are in the early days of home automation, and all it takes is one bad story about the hacker adjusting your thermostat to sour the market.

The only way to achieve those objectives is to exercise some control over hardware manufacturers. Sure, you may lose some compatibility this way, but that is infinitely preferable to a security risk in a poorly-understood environment without good security hygiene traditions. As a software developer who works with Bluetooth hardware, the Apple MFI certification process is the only hardware cert for home automation I am aware of. So even if I was an Android dev, I would prefer to purchase hardware that went through MFI as it gives me a basic level of confidence that somebody signed off on this.

Secondly HK explicitly includes measures for compatibility, including a type of "bridge device" that can translate between HK and a manufacturer's proprietary (or open, as the case may be) format.

Thirdly you have to consider HK's target audience. One of the headline features inside the HK Apis is the support for multiple homes. The people who are early adopters of HK in the near future are not hackers sharing an apartment. It's the Tim Cooks of the world where throwing out the existing automation hardware is not of any concern.

Sure, at some point it will become ubiquitous, and as the market matures news stories about the dangerous thermostat hackers will be less of a concern. But that's not this release, and it may not be within the next five years. That's more than enough time to create HK bridges and poly lingual lightbulbs that speak multiple APIs and so on.

[coldtea]

I already aknowledged Amazon has a fine IaaS in AWS, but that's not really what we were talking about. The cloud we were talking about is the SaaS part.

Apple doesn't do IaaS anyway (at all), so it makes no sense to compare offerings in this area with Apple's.

For the SaaS that Apple does, it has huge successes with iCloud and iTMS and the App Store.

We might find them klunky or whatever (compared to what? Google Play? Kindle's sync?), but if it was a third party company called iTunes that had the #1 music store in the U.S, it would be hailed as a huge success in itself. And for Apple it's just a byproduct, and coming from a company with no roots in the music business at all when it started it.

>a certainly deficient experience with devices owned by others with whom you may want to share an experience, Apple will always be second fiddle.

At least Apple has the "seamlessly between Apple devices" right. There are platforms that even between devices of that one platform the sharing experience is subpar.

But, as someone who works with Windows and Linux too, and has an iPhone and a cheap Android phone, I really don't see any platform that does this cross-platform sharing thing any better ("first fiddle").

How's sharing from Android to iOS or Windows Phone or PC any better?

[MAGZine]

I disagree.

Kindle is a shining example of this.

Apple on the other hand... well, they created iTunes... but that's really the only "cloud" technology that they have besides the actual iCloud (hosted on AWS, possibly?). Apple has shown that they struggle when creating web experiences for customer. Remember ping.fm?

[coldtea]

>Apple on the other hand... well, they created iTunes... but that's really the only "cloud" technology that they have besides the actual iCloud (hosted on AWS, possibly?). Apple has shown that they struggle when creating web experiences for customer. Remember ping.fm?

Yes, what about it? I also remember 20+ music stores that were created, touted to high heavens, gone nowhere and stopped existing (from Napster to Rhapsody etc), whereas iTMS succeeded widly.

It's not like Google for example doesn't have its share of Cloud failures. Google Wave anyone? Google+ that everybody seems to hate except some a-list tech writers, and which hardly made a dent against FB usage? Google Video? And tons of other folded attempts.

And it's not just iTunes.

It's also the App Store (which is a different beast to the music store). The Movies. iCloud for sync and backup and image sharing etc.

I agree that their web (in-browser) offerings (like iCloud office apps) are not very enticing.

But Apple's really not into using the Cloud for in-browser web apps -- they use it for enabling native apps to communicate and share data, and at massive scale at that.

[malandrew]

Exactly.

And iTunes worked for three reasons: (1) it's a single player experience; (2) the iPod; (3) DRM lock-in (there is no longer lock-in, but only for songs purchased after the date lock-in was expired. iTunes Match was a service added to maintain lock-in after DRM-free music was announced.)

[eridius]

Given that Apple tries to lump all its cloud offerings under the iCloud banner, deliberately dismissing iCloud in order to claim that iTunes is the only "cloud" technology Apple has is extremely disingenuous.

[MAGZine]

I dismiss iCould because it's large data storage. It doesn't prove apple is any good with making web services that people want to use, just that they're good at sending data, receiving it, storing it for later retrieval.

I'm not handing out praise for being able to run an smtp server. (alright, that's a bit reductionist, but you get the idea)

[eridius]

> I dismiss iCould because it's large data storage.

It's a lot more than that. It's all of Apple's cloud offerings, including email, contacts, calendars, iWork, backup, document synchronization, data-specific synchronization of various things like keychain and mail accounts, photos (storage, syncing, and galleries), it even covers their services like Find My iPhone.

There is a lot of stuff Apple is doing with iCloud, but the vast majority of it just silently works, so you aren't even considering that it exists when you talk about iCloud.

I suspect that what you're really trying to say is that Apple has not done much in the arena of building web apps, but even that's not accurate anymore, they have a decent suite of stuff available on icloud.com (including collaborative document editing).

[malandrew]

    "It's all of Apple's cloud offerings, including email, 
    contacts, calendars, iWork, backup, document 
    synchronization, data-specific synchronization of various 
    things like keychain and mail accounts, photos (storage, 
    syncing, and galleries), it even covers their services 
    like Find My iPhone."

Yes, but almost all those APIs are made available as a cloud offering to Apple software only. Third party developers are only afforded the ability to interface with most of these APIs via APIs in FoundationKit.

If I can only get access to this stuff via an API on the device, then it is not really cloud API. It's not like Apple is making these APIs available to developers via something like REST.

The only ones that are available are those that have a strong open standard that Apple can't wall gardenify like IMAP/SMTP, CalDAV and CardDAV.

[eridius]

Since when does "cloud" require an API that's open to the entire world? That's never been part of the definition of cloud services before. And there's no compelling argument for why Apple should try and open up iCloud to people who aren't using Apple devices (which is to say, there's no good argument for why it's in Apple's own interest to do that; obviously there are arguments for why other people might want them to provide that access).

Also, there's no such thing as "FoundationKit". There's a framework Foundation.framework, but most of the iCloud-related APIs live elsewhere.