11 ms·

For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

215 points by sandipc 15y ago

5h 15y ago
the word cloud appears 43 times on that page ... Larry Ellisons rant (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOEFXaWHpp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOEFXaWHpp) is more apt then ever.
- bradleyland 15y ago
  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.
flamingbuffalo 15y ago
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 http://daringfireball.net/2011/06/demoted
- sandipc 15y ago
  Interesting, I must have missed that earlier this week. Great concise summary of the long term philosophies of the two companies. Thanks.
  - stanleydrew 15y ago
    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 http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/12/cloud-os.html
recoiledsnake 15y ago
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.
- dstein 15y ago
  How do you market MS-only products when all the early adopters are using Macbooks?
  - ice5nake 15y ago
    "all the early adopters"? Isn't that's a bit hyperbolic? Can you clarify this?
    - shadowfox 15y ago
      Not an uncommon view. There are people who believe that no competent developer uses Windows machines for development, for example
  - Wilya 15y ago
    What does MS-only mean ? They actually provide client apps for macs, if that's what you meant.
    - dstein 15y ago
      By MS-only, I refer to Microsoft technologies and development tools for Windows, Windows Phone, Azure. Early adopters (alpha geeks, developers, etc) generally use Macbooks now which you can see for yourself at any tech conference. Microsoft really doesn't market to this group, it pretends they don't exist.
- danieldk 15y ago
  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'.
jasonkolb 15y ago
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.
- sigzero 15y ago
  I agree. It is the simplicity of things that Apple gets right. Most of the time when Apple says "it just works" that it does and consumers like that.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
  I agree not massively innovative but it's not just the presentation, they're very good at removing all the rough edges and creating a coherent whole.
- peterb 15y ago
  The difference is more nuanced than sales. At Apple designers rule, and because Steve understands design, they higher excellent designers. At Microsoft program manager's rule, and a PM is neither a technologist nor a designer. They represent "the user". As a result Microsoft is great at feature-rich products that solve many problems. At Apple, they focus on the human side of technology. They try to make things easier to use. They focus on design details and strive for minimalism while still being feature rich. At Microsoft a PM could never remove an on/off button from an MP3 player. Microsoft's cloud strategy is very good for their business. They will run many enterprise products in the cloud successfully (Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) that generate revenue. You just won't read about them in sfgate.
  - brown9-2 15y ago
woan 15y ago
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-services-full-story.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/software-plus-... Unless by services they means software updates, CDDB updates, and downloading Office templates...
programminggeek 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    Yes, it's a new HTTP method ... THERE HTTP/1.1
  - foobarbazetc 15y ago
    The used the word sync several times. It's not magic: it's syncing in the background.
jccodez 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
hussam 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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.
gallerytungsten 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
westajay 15y ago
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.
napierzaza 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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.
alphadog 15y ago
Google is the "cloud". Apple gives the "cloud" branding and a logo.
Splines 15y ago
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).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb263932(v=vs.85).as... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/business/technology-microsoft-has-quietly-shelved-its-internet-persona-service.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/business/technology-micros...
kefs 15y ago
>> 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.
Yhippa 15y ago
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.
nhannah 15y ago
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 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.
JunkDNA 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
- neuroelectronic 15y ago
  Are you suggesting that Chinese will buy an iPad to do their computing?
Apocryphon 15y ago
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.
tct 15y ago
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.
sganesh 15y ago
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.
dkl 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Sounds like your network is suffering from http://www.bufferbloat.net/ 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.
paulitex 15y ago
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 15y ago
  > vapourware There's a beta. Register and download it.
  - neuroelectronic 15y ago
    No thanks, Google will host my personal data for free, and it works on all platforms.
    - maercsrats 15y ago
      Actually, the cost is your click habits. Google is all about getting advertisers to sign on by saying "we have better information on all these people because we house all their data." If you are comfortable with that, that's fine. Personally, I like Apple's (and for the most part Microsoft) "we don't give a shit about you unless you pay us money." When I stop paying them, I don't have to worry about them keeping any of my data. When I stop using Google products do I have the same guarantee? This is the same argument I use against Facebook.
      - yumraj 15y ago
        I think you're making an assumption that Apple and MS don't track your click habits, as you put it, in addition to charging you for it. Is there really a guarantee from Apple/MS that once you stop paying them they won't keep your data? At least Google is sorta-kinda upfront that they're doing it.
ezy 15y ago
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.
- dstein 15y ago
  Also "From the makers of Internet Explorer" doesn't exactly have a nice ring to it. Microsoft has a bad track record in exactly the areas that "the cloud" is supposed to fix (security, stability, backups, crash-free, virus-free, maintenance-free, "it just works"). Their PR team has a big job ahead of them.
  - dorian-graph 15y ago
    They're now doing a lot better now -- and have been for a few years, it seems. People love Windows7 and the virus/security thing is now no longer cool to say. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is widely proclaimed as one of the best security apps available -- recently there was a thread on Reddit asking for 'Must have free apps' and seemingly every second person was suggesting MSE. In regards to maintenance, registry cleaners, defraggers and the like all seem to be fading away from our view. Like with security, speaking of 'BSODs' has dramatically died down and Win7 is not known for stability issues.
- 15y ago
ChuckMcM 15y ago
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 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060521996
- contextfree 15y ago
  Huh? They've delivered lots of stuff. Some bad stuff, some good stuff. The real problem is the lack of cohesion.
  - georgemcbay 15y ago
    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.
dynosaur 15y ago
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.
ajennings 15y ago
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 15y ago
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_Computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput... 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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.

215 points by sandipc 15y ago

5h 15y ago

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

bradleyland 15y ago
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.

flamingbuffalo 15y ago

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

sandipc 15y ago
Interesting, I must have missed that earlier this week. Great concise summary of the long term philosophies of the two companies. Thanks.
- stanleydrew 15y ago
  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 http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/12/cloud-os.html

recoiledsnake 15y ago

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.

dstein 15y ago
How do you market MS-only products when all the early adopters are using Macbooks?
- ice5nake 15y ago
  "all the early adopters"? Isn't that's a bit hyperbolic? Can you clarify this?
  - shadowfox 15y ago
    Not an uncommon view. There are people who believe that no competent developer uses Windows machines for development, for example
- Wilya 15y ago
  What does MS-only mean ? They actually provide client apps for macs, if that's what you meant.
  - dstein 15y ago
    By MS-only, I refer to Microsoft technologies and development tools for Windows, Windows Phone, Azure. Early adopters (alpha geeks, developers, etc) generally use Macbooks now which you can see for yourself at any tech conference. Microsoft really doesn't market to this group, it pretends they don't exist.
danieldk 15y ago
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'.

jasonkolb 15y ago

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.

sigzero 15y ago
I agree. It is the simplicity of things that Apple gets right. Most of the time when Apple says "it just works" that it does and consumers like that.
Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
I agree not massively innovative but it's not just the presentation, they're very good at removing all the rough edges and creating a coherent whole.
peterb 15y ago
The difference is more nuanced than sales. At Apple designers rule, and because Steve understands design, they higher excellent designers. At Microsoft program manager's rule, and a PM is neither a technologist nor a designer. They represent "the user". As a result Microsoft is great at feature-rich products that solve many problems. At Apple, they focus on the human side of technology. They try to make things easier to use. They focus on design details and strive for minimalism while still being feature rich. At Microsoft a PM could never remove an on/off button from an MP3 player. Microsoft's cloud strategy is very good for their business. They will run many enterprise products in the cloud successfully (Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) that generate revenue. You just won't read about them in sfgate.
- brown9-2 15y ago

woan 15y ago

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-services-full-story.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/software-plus-... Unless by services they means software updates, CDDB updates, and downloading Office templates...

programminggeek 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Yes, it's a new HTTP method ... THERE HTTP/1.1
- foobarbazetc 15y ago
  The used the word sync several times. It's not magic: it's syncing in the background.

jccodez 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.

hussam 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.

gallerytungsten 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.

westajay 15y ago

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.

napierzaza 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.

alphadog 15y ago

Google is the "cloud". Apple gives the "cloud" branding and a logo.

Splines 15y ago

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).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb263932(v=vs.85).as... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/business/technology-microsoft-has-quietly-shelved-its-internet-persona-service.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/business/technology-micros...

kefs 15y ago

>> 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.

Yhippa 15y ago

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.

nhannah 15y ago

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 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.

JunkDNA 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
neuroelectronic 15y ago
Are you suggesting that Chinese will buy an iPad to do their computing?

Apocryphon 15y ago

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.

tct 15y ago

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.

sganesh 15y ago

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.

dkl 15y ago

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 15y ago
Sounds like your network is suffering from http://www.bufferbloat.net/ 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.

paulitex 15y ago

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 15y ago
> vapourware There's a beta. Register and download it.
- neuroelectronic 15y ago
  No thanks, Google will host my personal data for free, and it works on all platforms.
  - maercsrats 15y ago
    Actually, the cost is your click habits. Google is all about getting advertisers to sign on by saying "we have better information on all these people because we house all their data." If you are comfortable with that, that's fine. Personally, I like Apple's (and for the most part Microsoft) "we don't give a shit about you unless you pay us money." When I stop paying them, I don't have to worry about them keeping any of my data. When I stop using Google products do I have the same guarantee? This is the same argument I use against Facebook.
    - yumraj 15y ago
      I think you're making an assumption that Apple and MS don't track your click habits, as you put it, in addition to charging you for it. Is there really a guarantee from Apple/MS that once you stop paying them they won't keep your data? At least Google is sorta-kinda upfront that they're doing it.

ezy 15y ago

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.

dstein 15y ago
Also "From the makers of Internet Explorer" doesn't exactly have a nice ring to it. Microsoft has a bad track record in exactly the areas that "the cloud" is supposed to fix (security, stability, backups, crash-free, virus-free, maintenance-free, "it just works"). Their PR team has a big job ahead of them.
- dorian-graph 15y ago
  They're now doing a lot better now -- and have been for a few years, it seems. People love Windows7 and the virus/security thing is now no longer cool to say. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is widely proclaimed as one of the best security apps available -- recently there was a thread on Reddit asking for 'Must have free apps' and seemingly every second person was suggesting MSE. In regards to maintenance, registry cleaners, defraggers and the like all seem to be fading away from our view. Like with security, speaking of 'BSODs' has dramatically died down and Win7 is not known for stability issues.
15y ago

ChuckMcM 15y ago

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 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060521996

contextfree 15y ago
Huh? They've delivered lots of stuff. Some bad stuff, some good stuff. The real problem is the lack of cohesion.
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  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.

dynosaur 15y ago

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.

ajennings 15y ago

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 15y ago

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_Computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput... 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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.