Well we all knew it was on the cards. Apple being true to their horrible, proprietary selves have finally jumped on the cloud bandwagon. Never mind the fact that iTunes is generally full of overpriced rubbish, or that any Mac user will want Microsoft Office access (guess we'll find out how well Office 365 works on a Mac). I can see the point for apps, though, I guess....maybe - but short of being another drop station for your iPhone, my thoughts are that this particular endeavour is going to crash and burn. Jobs and co will be banking on the 'success' of the iPhone 'App Store' to carry over to the personal computer (as is Google), but there's just one problem - I can't tell you one person, including myself, that is using a marketplace app for home computing. Everything is pretty-much browser driven anyway, so what exactly is the point of having a 'cloud' market for machines that have the capacity to drive it through a browser? Answer: none.
Unlike the new Chrome PC's where the browser IS the PC, Macs have hard drives just like regular PC's...and they support multiple browser types (at the moment anyway). With smartphones, it makes sense: there is only so much real-estate on the screen, processor grunt and bandwidth available to the phone, so you want a downloadable app to maximize all three. Personal computers don't have these issues...and since Apple isn't a particular notable software publisher, what would be the drive (other than by force) to use iCloud for anything other than a glorified storage locker?? All this money spent and Apple could STILL lose marketshare to Google who will be invading Apple's very own machines via HTML5.
Don't get me wrong, I understand why Apple is pushing this 'me too' platform - I just don't see the point of it other than acting as yet another gateway for apps that will work on anything. As for companies that will develop for Mac exclusively, that's their funeral. Sure as heck doesn't work for iPhone, does it? (and that's considerably more popular than the Mac)
the only apps i use sorry cant call them that as i have an android phone are for video streaming to my consoles and tv to downloading torrents, but i do have a dual boot system running on my streak so i can run ubuntu on it. so i don't have to take my laptop out with me on all my call outs. but back on topic like your other thread about sony doing there own cloud service i have a really bad feeling that this is going to end up being the way for all company's therefore the unified future that we all want wont happen as they will all be saying sorry you can't use your items on that setup as it don't include us. there needs to be some sort of intervention into this technology like the EU have done with mobile phone market and the countless different charger connections around into one micro usb standard that all company's agreed to including apple
ReplyDeleteRight on the money, g. The way things are going, we are going to end up with a bunch of competing 'clouds' that do 'some' of what we want but not all. This world as we know it will eventually end up as two clouds (maybe three) - all the others will eventually fall over from lack of revenue. I just wish we didn't have to go through the motions and people would just accept that moving forward together, from the start, is the way to go.
ReplyDelete