Documents and API

What about documents? There is a slight problem with those. iCloud is not the same as MobileMe, i.e., a network drive that can be “mounted” in any application that supports working with drives. Only applications whose developers have decided to use the API for iCloud support iCloud for documents. The first was, of course, the iWork business suite, which made sense and was a good example. Anything written in iWork on an iPad is immediately available on the user’s Mac.

Apple has made this API available to third parties, and other developers are already delivering applications that support data storage in iCloud. The interface stores two types of data: documents, i.e., files stored as they are, and data, i.e., items written to a database that the device can directly request and load in the structure it needs. Applications can thus pull settings directly from the cloud, and such an application can open in the state in which you left it on another device. This is another interesting vision.

And what else is special? The iCloud API can also be used from Windows applications, if developers integrate it into them. Is this a provocation from Apple? No, rather further pressure to shift from the importance of applications to the importance of documents: it will no longer matter what operating system you work on and what application you use, but rather the data you want to create. On the go on your iPhone, at home on your Mac, at work on Windows – this is something that can only benefit Apple. Apple wanted to release iCloud support for Windows in 2011, but by early 2012, it still hadn’t succeeded. Didn’t we say that the company has ongoing problems with web application development?

However, for Windows users, it released iCloud Control Panel for Windows, which allows you to set up and control synchronization.

One more thing is worth noting. Videos are not included in iCloud, not even those from iTunes. Apple’s confidence in the telecommunications infrastructure is apparently limited after all.

Immediately after the introduction of iCloud, there were numerous comments about how Apple had copied Dropbox and other applications that are similar at first glance. However, this is far from the truth. The Digital Hub is a concept that Steve Jobs has had in mind for a long time. The first preserved video presentation dates back to 1997, when Jobs enthusiastically talks about how data will not be stored on local stations but will be transferred via a high-speed network from data storage facilities.

Until now, Apple lacked the technology, business model, and market power, but a few years ago, Jobs decided that THE moment had come. Apple began construction of a huge data center in Maiden, North Carolina, the one Jobs showed in his presentation. It is said to be one of the largest data centers in the world, and Apple has invested half a billion dollars in it, with another half billion to be invested in the coming years. In terms of investment and size, it is as large as the North Carolina data centers of Google and Facebook combined. It is clear that Apple had to prepare for its cloud solution for a long time, because Apple iCloud gained the number of clients that Dropbox had collected over two years within five hours of launching the service. Not long ago, Apple purchased 12 petabytes of disk capacity for this data center, so it was preparing for decent traffic.

In summary, the server demands of Apple products are orders of magnitude higher than those of its competitors because Apple must offer its products to all customers and maintain high-quality operation. It cannot afford many oddities, such as MobileMe with its problematic speed and reliability. Therefore, the solution must be robust, which takes time. The idea that Apple could solve this by buying Dropbox and integrating it into its operating systems is laughable. Suddenly, it would have 100,× nd more users, and without fundamental changes, the existing solution would struggle to cope.

And there is one more thing that is interesting about cloud solutions: they challenge our established habits. Until now, we have always [“owned”]{dir=”rtl”} our data, i.e., we had it on our hard drive, our storage medium. Suddenly, we have it somewhere else, we only have [a “claim”]{dir=”rtl”} to it[,]{dir=”rtl”} but physically it is “out there somewhere[.]{dir=”rtl”}” It’s an unfamiliar concept that many find difficult to accept. And it also challenges other established habits, such as directory structure and removable storage media. Files are suddenly searched for, clouds no longer always structure them into directories, but rather tag them or simply search for them. And removable storage media? Who would be interested in them when the line is thick enough?

For Apple, attacking our habits is a potential gold mine. The operating system is becoming a secondary issue; it is no longer true that those who do not have Windows are unable to work and exchange documents. Open formats ensure cross-platform portability, while clouds enable data exchange and synchronization, opening the door to what was previously unthinkable: software and hardware diversity, which can be packaged with added services, especially the sale of music, videos, and books. It is no coincidence that books from Apple’s iBooks can now also be purchased on iTunes, although they can only be read on Apple mobile platforms for the time being. But everything in good time.

In any case, it is the iCloud platform, together with the iPad’s liberation from its ties to desktop computers, that will be the source of Apple’s potential for further interesting years, when it may succeed in significantly disrupting Wintel’s monopoly not only in mobile phones, where it has already effectively destroyed it, but also in personal computers. If anything can prevent this, it will not be Microsoft’s ability to repel the attack, but rather Apple’s stubbornness in not making its solutions available to a sufficiently wide range of competitors.

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Documents and API

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