[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.