Outside Innovation

What’s Your Customer Cloud Strategy?

With the looming Facebook IPO and the flap about Google’s new privacy policies on many peoples’ minds, we thought it would be a good time to step back and think about how customers want to use the cloud.

The Cloud Stores and Synchronizes Information for Us. When we think of consumer cloud offerings, we think of capabilities like Apple’s iCloud, which is useful for backing up our photographs, keeping our digital music libraries, and synchronizing all of our data across our various mobile and non-mobile i-friendly devices. If we use any of the current Apple devices and software, iCloud is available to us as a free service. If we want to use Apple’s Music Match service, or to buy additional storage in the iCloud, we can pay extra.

We Don’t Need to Know What Computers and Operating Systems Run in the Cloud. As customers, we know that the cloud is “out there” somewhere. It’s on the Internet. We don’t much care where it is. In fact, that’s the benefit to us. All of the stuff that we care about is backed up and synchronized using these ephemeral services that run “out there, somewhere.” The “cloud” that Apple offers us is actually powered by physical computers that run in one or more physical data centers in one or more regions of the world. But we don’t care where they are or what they are, as long as they keep running and backing up and synchronizing our data.

Why Is There Steady Migration to the Cloud Despite Reliability and Security Concerns?

Over the past few months, there have been a number of notable service quality incidents and security breaches of online services, including Sony’s PlayStation network, Amazon’s cloud service, Dropbox’s storage in the cloud, and countless others. The bar talk around “cloud” computing and online services would have you think that businesses and consumers are shying away from using hosted services, using Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, from storing their data “in the cloud,” or from migrating some or all of their computing infrastructure to virtual machines hosted by cloud service providers. However, there’s actually an uptick in the uptake of cloud computing in all of its various incarnations.

We (consumers and businesses) are using “cloud” services for all of the following kinds of activities:

1. Accessing and downloading media.

2. Accessing and downloading mobile apps.

3. Accessing and running business applications (CRM, hiring, ecommerce, logistics, provisioning, etc.).

4. Collaborating with colleagues, clients, and customers (project management, online communities, email, meeting scheduling).

5. Analyzing large amounts of data.

6. Storing large amounts of data (much of it unstructured, like video, images, text files, etc.).

7. Developing and testing new applications and online services.

Apple’s iCloud: Misunderstood and Underrated

Apple’s iCloud service won’t formally debut until the Fall of 2011, yet it has attracted many criticisms. We think that Apple’s iCloud actually raises the customer experience bar, yet again. With iCloud, Apple is redefining the experience of mobile offline and online computing by automagically synching and backing up all of your applications, files, and preferences across devices. If you lose your phone or your computer dies, you’ll be able to restore everything to exactly the way it was before. If you take a picture on one device, it will magically appear in your photo library on all your other devices. If you are working on a document or a spreadsheet on your iPad, it will magically appear with your cursor in the same spot on your MacBook. And, if you don’t have connectivity, you can keep on working, using your applications, and enjoying your music, etc. until you’re able to re-synch.

Apple uses its “cloud” service with tight integration into its operating systems to deliver this seamless peripatetic computing experience. Application developers who want their applications to conform to that experience will need to write to a new set of application programming interfaces (APIs). If developers want their applications to behave consistently across other operating system platforms and ecosystems (e.g., Windows, RIM, Android, and so on), they’ll need to do more work in order to provide an equivalent cross-platform seamless experience.

Today, there are a number of applications that work really well across platforms (RIM Blackberry, iPad, Mac, PC, Android, etc.), such as Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader, Evernote for capturing, tagging, and annotating information, and, of course, almost all Web-based apps, like Facebook, Gmail, Google apps, and so on. They all manage to deliver good synchronization across mobile apps and across platforms.

The gauntlet that Apple is throwing down with its seamless online/offline/mobile experience brought to you via iCloud is to provide a single environment that keeps all your applications, data, and preferences synched up. That’s going to be a tough act to follow.

 Why Apple's iCloud Service Will Be Successful
iCloud Service Provides Much-Needed Seamless Synchronization of Digital Media and Applications
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, June 30, 2011

 

Apple: iCloud = Seamless Multi-Device Experience

I was pleased that Apple’s iCloud met 10 out of 12 of the customer-critical requirements we listed before the announcement! The combination of Apple’s iCloud, iMusic, Lion (the next gen OS for the Mac available next month), and iOS 5 (the next gen OS for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch—available “this Fall”) is a HUGE innovation in ubiquitous computing. It’s invisible computing. With this next generation Apple experience, YOU are truly the center of your universe. The devices you use are interchangeable (as long as they run iOS!), and ALL YOUR INFORMATION—from digital assets to contact lists to work in progress—are automagically synched, behind the scenes, to the Apple iCloud. Apple has done this without requiring you to DO anything. It’s the default. And, as Steve Jobs puts it, “It just works!”

iCloud Provides Seamless Synching of All Your Work and Assets. Whenever your devices are Internet-connected (via broadband, WiFi, or mobile communications) they will automatically synch everything you do on each device to the iCloud and back to all your other i-devices. This is HUGE! We’ve had applications that synched magically before: Lotus Notes, Blackberry mail, all the Google apps (calendar, email, etc.), Evernote, and many, many more. But we’ve never had ALL our apps and ALL our files and ALL our music and ALL our photos synched up immediately. And you don’t need to own a Mac (or a PC) or any computer to have this capability. This is the Post-PC, multiple-device, use it, and don’t worry if you lose it, era!

Keeps Every Version of Your Work in Progress. Lion and iOS 5—the next versions of the Apple OS—also handle automatic version control. You don’t have to save your work in progress. Everything is saved and versioned automagically. You can continue to work exactly where you left off, using any application, and you can revert to an earlier version, or retrieve something from an earlier version. You don’t have to re-set up your work environment either. All of your open menus, the position of your cursor, etc., will be exactly the way you left them. The first applications to make use of this capability will be Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—the Apple suite of office apps. But, soon, any application that is ported to run on Lion will have that automatic versioning capability built in.