When your stock dips at the point in your big annual event where it’s clear that you have nothing else to say, you’re not in a happy place. That’s Apple’s problem for today. There’s no question that the Apple aficionados liked the chances to iOS and OSX, and perhaps liked the new notion of an Apple radio too. Stars will surely be promoting the new look of iOS on TV shows. The investors weren’t quite so happy. I wasn’t either because Apple again turned its back on the cloud.
Yes, I heard the iWork/iCloud thing. It was Google Drive or SkyDrive a year or so too late. Apple is still sending a very clear signal that its future may not be a cool device every six months, but rather software designed to buff up their current developer posture. It’s not the cloud, and that’s a problem for Apple under the best of conditions. We’re far from those conditions now.
In case you’ve missed my view on this issue, let me state it again. In a mobile revolution there is absolutely no place for a strategy that isn’t grounded in cloud computing. Appliances, to be relevant in terms of moving the ball, are going to have to get smaller and more specialized. Small, specialized stuff can’t differentiate itself based on a GUI or internal application support. Think of how differentiated an iWatch could be in either area. The inevitable trend in appliances is the trend of visual agent, which is even less than the role of functional agent that some cloud process might play. A gadget with simple capabilities can do profound things if you link it to the power of the cloud. Absent that linkage it’s just a toy, and so Apple’s reluctance to be a real cloud player makes it into a toy player instead, which won’t sustain its reputation or stock price over time.
Mobile users value context, the ability of the tech gadget they have to provide stuff that’s relevant to what they’re actually doing at the moment. Contextual value is critical because mobile devices are integrated into our routine behavior, literally as part of our lives. We use then not to research or to plan, but to decide, to do. There’s an immediacy and a demand for immediate relevance that exists for mobile, and thus for all personal gadgets—because those gadgets are either mobile with us or they’re irrelevant. Apple of all companies, the company of the cool and empowered, should have seen this all along. They don’t seem to see it now.
The big beneficiary of Apple’s mistake with the cloud is likely to be not Google but Microsoft. RIM’s disintegration put its slot of the smartphone space up for grabs. One could argue that Blackberry enthusiasts could have defected to Apple or Google at any time, though arguably Apple’s lack of cloud insight would have made at least that migration path harder. In any event, those that stayed are now far game to Microsoft. Microsoft has better corporate street creds than Apple or Google at this point, and if Apple refuses to exercise its cloud options optimally then Microsoft may have an unfettered run at number three in smartphones and tablets.
The “Why?” of this is probably pretty easy to see. Apple is the company who has resisted any kind of resident sub-platform (even Flash) that would let developers port applications between iPhones and competitive devices. Apple is the company who wants only in-iTunes and not in-app sales. They’ve fought to control all the financial tendrils of their commercial organism, so it’s not surprising that they’d resist the notion of pulling functionality out of devices and cloud-hosting it. Such functionality would be anything but limited to Apple platforms, and so it would weaken Apple’s desire to brand its ecosystem and not share it.
The cloud, then, is about sharing. Web services are open to all, and so they inherently diminish the power of the device, the user platform. For somebody like Microsoft whose platforms are at high risk in the current era, rolling the dice on the cloud makes a lot of sense. Apple, king of the device hill, saw it differently. So will other vendors, in both the IT and the network space, and like Apple they put themselves at risk.
IT, when combined with a more agile and dynamic vision of application componentization and deployment, could enrich companies by enhancing worker productivity. Microsoft and all the other IT giants probably fear that a radical cloud vision could unseat them, which it could. HP, Oracle, SAP, and other software/hardware giants are desperately trying to control the revolution. Somebody could embrace it. Apple could have articulated such a vision.
We are in the most innovative industry of all time, an industry that gave meaning to the notion of “Internet years” as a measure of the pace of progress. It’s time to recapture that. Defense is what killed the incumbents of the past, not innovation.