Apple’s iCloud online storage service has received plenty of press attention and generated an equal amount of debate. Most people have focused on its potential impact on consumer markets. As a consequence, iTunes fundamentally changed the music and media industries forever.
Apple’s share of the PC market has grown to nearly 10% while the overall PC business has experienced a decline in growth. Why? Because Apple’s latest innovation – the iPad — is now taking over the mobile computer market. Why is this quick rise of Apple’s technology innovation important?
End-users within corporate environments are now demanding to use these devices to do their everyday jobs. I’ve long believed that the popularity of Flicker among adult consumers helped to bring attention to the importance of backup and storage services among corporate workers. Apple has become tired of being viewed as a consumer brand that inspired the success of others in the corporate SaaS and Cloud industries. It now wants a share of the corporate market as well.
Not to be outdone by Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and the rest of the cloud bandwagon, Best Buy is also expanding its own services up in the sky. Today it has launched a new music streaming offering—appropriately enough called Best Buy Music Cloud. On the surface, it sounds strikingly similar to what Apple will be offering users in its iCloud music service, but with a few differences:
Price: If what you want is an annual subscription to the service, at $24.99, Apple is undercutting Best Buy’s $29.99 pricetag. Best Buy’s partner in Europe, Carphone Warehouse, launched Music Cloud in the UK nearly a year ago, under the brand name My Music Anywhere. Like Best Buy, Carphone Warehouse sells standalone subscriptions to the service. Both Best Buy’s and Carphone Warehouse’s services are powered by Catch Media, a cloud media startup that picked up investment from Motorola Mobility earlier this year.
What Apple’s iCloud Means in the Hosting World
It has been a couple of weeks since Apple released the details of its heavily anticipated iCloud product.
The new service enables users to sync their content – including applications, music, and images – on multiple Apple devices and computers via the cloud.
iCloud a consumer cloud storage product, not necessarily a business tool
First off, iCloud is not intended to be a business tool. "iCloud is a consumer play, more for everyday Apple product users to store pictures, music, documents, email and calendars in the cloud so users can have access to their data online and on all of their Apple devices," says Scott Gibson, director of product management for Big Data at Rackspace
iCloud is aimed at certain file types, such as music and movie files
iCloud is built specifically to support Apple devices
As a storage service for Apple devices and computers, iCloud has a lot of potential to make those products more appealing. "iCloud already has a built-in audience," said Gibson. For Apple consumers, iCloud is a perfect solution for having access to music, pictures, email, and calendars across all iOS devices."
iCloud's existence is an endorsement of the "cloud" across user groups and models of consuming things
"Apple's announcement of iCloud is a huge proof point to the importance of the cloud," said Gibson. iCloud strengthens Apple's "app" model in a way that will ultimately have a strong big-picture influence on how applications, data and infrastructure interact
"Apple's iCloud model uses local apps transparently interconnected through the Cloud. Browsers Everywhere vs Apps Everywhere.
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