This is largely nonsensical. Apple has trouble with "The Cloud", so it should buy a company that doesn't solve any of its problems, as a signaling device to pot

This is largely nonsensical. Apple has trouble with "The Cloud", so it should buy a company that doesn't solve any of its problems, as a signaling device to potential future hires? What? And I take second place to no man in my disdain for WebObjects, but I know for a fact that a) Apple has very good engineers working on tooling and b) it really doesn't matter to the problems as stated, which are much more about executive attention. The cloud stuff doesn't make money. Apple is (or was, when I was there last) an extremely profit conscious organization. The reason that the various previous internet initiatives were failures is not because Apple can't hire good engineers, or uses yesterday's technology, but rather because no executive was going to make it to VP by spending a bunch of money and more importantly engineer time on something that by design loses money, and has only the vaguest connection to driving adoption of hardware. This latter has certainly changed -- if the OP has noticed that Android "Just Works" in ways that iOS doesn't, rest assured that Apple knows.