Apple’s iCloud service, according to a blog post in the New York Times, may not be quite the innovation that the company is making it out to be. A recent presentation by Steve Jobs detailed what the offering held in store for Apple customers but, according to the blog post, there are quite a few unanswered questions that constitute significant issues for many of the people that currently use online storage.
Proprietary Issues
When Jobs made his presentation, the blog points out, he didn’t specify whether file formats that are not native to the Apple line of products would be supported by the service. Many business users who have online storage use it to house a variety of different files in many different formats. In fact, one of the most useful features is that it can hold files in just about any format imaginable. If Apple intends to restrict its storage to formats used by its other products, users may not find it to be quite as flexible as they need.
The iCloud offering is not the only game in town, either. Competing companies include Amazon, which has begun offering its own cloud storage service that is generally pretty similar to what Apple is about to debut. The blog post points out that this is not the first time Apple has offered online storage, either. The initial offering by the Apple Corporation was never very popular.
Mobile Devices
While the Apple Corporation has debuted many of the mobile devices in use, there are plenty of competitors in this field, as well. The biggest competitor is Android, an operating system for mobile devices developed by Google. As the blog post points out, other online storage services work fine with Android devices. This means that, in the big picture sense, there may not really be any reason for users to adopt Apple’s iCloud service over others, particularly if Apple storage services restricted to their own file formats. While Apple did not clarify whether or not other file formats would be supported in its iCloud storage, current online storage systems will function with existing Apple mobile products. Of course, mobile products will become more and more tied into online storage as users have larger amounts of data to store than these devices can hold.
Innovation
Even as providers begin offering more products based on the concept of online storage and what it can offer customers, these customers are finding new uses for online storage space. This means that these companies will have to continue to innovate and that any service lacking in features may end up failing to generate significant interest among new users.
The iCloud will find itself in stiff competition with Google and Amazon, services that allow users to store many different types of file formats. For users who are interested in online storage for business purposes, a service that is tied directly to the specific manufacturer’s file formats may not be quite as useful as it could be.
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