The gate with MobileMe

Though Apple stumbled out of the gate with MobileMe, and it never as a matter of fact took off, Apple is now going all-in with their cloud strategy. Nevertheless they’re not doing it by simply tacking on cloud storage to their existing arsenal of products. They’re attempting to redefine what the "cloud" is.

The keynote

At one point while the keynote, Jobs noted that some people think of the cloud as a hard disk in the sky where you put files in and at the time take them out. He even took a small shot at red-hot Dropbox. However as Apple sees it, the cloud is something much more. "The truth is on the cloud," is how Jobs put it.

John Gruber correctly called that iCloud is in essence the new iTunes. In other words, it moves the digital hub from the desktop computer to the cloud. Nevertheless Apple is aiming beyond even that.

With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an nearly tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic.

The fundamentals are the same

While the fundamentals are the same, Apple’s approach to the concept of the cloud is the in contrast of their competitors. Apple’s belief is anyway you look at it that users will not and should not care how the cloud in fact works. When Jobs gave a brief glimpse of their new North Carolina data center in other words the centerpiece of iCloud, he only noted that it was full of "stuff" — "expensive stuff," he quipped.

The diagrams Jobs showed on stage as to how iCloud works were as simplified as possible. Had it not been announced at a developers conference, I’m not sure Apple would have even done those. Instead, the focus would have been moreover on the demos. You’re working on a document in Pages on your iPad, you move over to Pages on your Mac, and there it is. It even remembers where you were last editing. You download a song to your iPhone, you pick up your iPad, there it is.

The larger game here

And that speaks to the larger game here. Apple has been going out of their way to avoid using the word "syncing" with regard to iCloud. That implies that files exist in one place and need to be moved. Nevertheless again, even that’s too technical for the story Apple is weaving. With iPad/iPhone and now OS X Lion, you don’t save documents anymore. They save automatically — yet an easier way to think about it is that they just exist, as is, in realtime on all your devices.

Files are something Microsoft worries about. Files in the cloud are something Google and Amazon worry about. Apple’s iCloud is about opening an application and the thing you want to access being there.

Key difference between Apple

That as well speaks to a key difference between Apple and their competitors. With MobileMe, Apple put a fairly heavy emphasis on the web component. They spent months working on and reworking beautiful web apps for the service. While the iCloud keynote, there was no mention of a web component. For what it’s worth, we’ve heard that the MobileMe apps on me.com will be altered to work with iCloud apps, however that may be a ways off. And that will undoubtedly not be the primary emphasis. The primary emphasis will on the cross-device native apps with iCloud magic.

That’s the in contrast of Google’s approach — for the time being their Chrome/Chrome OS approach. That product is only about the web. That’s where everything exists, and syncing as well happens automatically thanks to that. In a weird twist, in that regard, Chrome OS is like as not the closest thing to Apple’s iCloud vision. When you boot up a Chromebook and enter your password, everything appears. Again, like magic.

But Google’s position is especially odd because they have Android as then. Yes, cloud syncing is a big component of that OS and has been for a during. Nevertheless it’s the Google approach. It’s files, and uploading, and syncing. Some of it is automatic, some is not. It requires some thought. It sort of just works — as long as you know what you’re doing.

And the truth is that this is the point where we may in effect start to see some in point of fact fundamental differences between Google and Apple afterwards the past few years going head-to-head with feature matching. Apple is going afterwards consumers who have thoroughly no idea what the cloud is, and don’t care. Apple is saying they shouldn’t care. It all just works.

Google seems to be aiming more for users who understand current computing paradigms and want to transition that knowledge to the future of computing, the cloud. Power users, if you will. Many of the people reading this post are in this camp. Nevertheless there are many more who are not.

Apple has rethought and rewritten their apps — including their desktop apps — from the ground up to be woven with iCloud fabric that a user won’t see. Google wants the users to be able to see that fabric if they choose to, and in many ways, encourages it as sort of a safety net in the transition to the cloud.

The same thing

It is two different approaches to the same thing, the cloud. And Apple doesn’t believe that Google can match them even if they wanted to because they don’t have complete control of their ecosystem in the same way that Apple does. "They can never make this so it just works," Jobs stated at one point.

In Apple’s core vision, there are three types of products that must seamlessly work with one another: phones, tablets, and the recently "demoted" PC. With Android, Google is currently only strong in phones. Tablets aren’t taking off for them but. And there is no PC presence — then, beyond the web, which again runs into the Chrome OS bifurcation problem.

With that in mind, it may end up being Apple that helps transition users to the cloud, instead of Google in spite of their emphasis on PC norms.

"You know, if the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software in them is their soul," Jobs said on Monday. Apple is now more anyway you look at it than ever betting that will not be web software, however native software backed invisibly by the web. Google’s position is definitely less clear. With the existence of Chrome OS and Android, they’re currently betting on both. That dichotomy screams anything yet "it just works."