Image via CrunchBaseJust yesterday I was reading this post and found myself shaking my head. TechCrunch: “It Just Works.”: Apple is now going all-in with their cloud strategy. But they’re not doing it by simply tacking on cloud storage to their existing arsenal of products. They’re attempting to redefine what the “cloud” is..... With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic. ....... Amazon, has essentially turned it into one giant server/hard drive that anyone can use for a fee ...... Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works. ...... You’re working on a document in Pages on your iPad, you move over to Pages on your Mac, and there it is. It even remembers where you were last editing. You download a song to your iPhone, you pick up your iPad, there it is. ....... With iPad/iPhone and now OS X Lion, you don’t save documents anymore. They save automatically — but an easier way to think about it is that they just exist, as is, in realtime on all your devices. ....... Files are something Microsoft worries about. Files in the cloud are something Google and Amazon worry about. Apple’s iCloud is about opening an application and the thing you want to access being there. ...... Chrome OS is perhaps the closest thing to Apple’s iCloud vision. When you boot up a Chromebook and enter your password, everything appears. Again, like magic. ...... this is the point where we may really start to see some truly fundamental differences between Google and Apple after the past few years going head-to-head with feature matching. Apple is going after consumers who have absolutely no idea what the cloud is, and don’t care. ........ Apple has rethought and rewritten their apps — including their desktop apps — from the ground up to be woven with iCloud fabric that a user won’t see. ..... And Apple doesn’t believe that Google can match them even if they wanted to because they don’t have complete control of their ecosystem in the same way that Apple does. ...... Apple is now more clearly than ever betting that will not be web software, but native software backed invisibly by the web.Steve Jobs is a living legend, and rightly so. At one point I compared him to Mozart, although it was an impulsive move on my part, I would not do it again. But I have some fundamental philosophical differences with the guy. I am not big on native software and that is why I think HTML5 is such good news.
And today I get the good news: Facebook is going after Apple with HTML5.
Image by marcopako via FlickrTechCrunch: Project Spartan: Facebook’s Hush-Hush Plan To Take On Apple On Their Own Turf: iOS: Project Spartan is the codename for a new platform Facebook is on verge of launching. It’s entirely HTML5-based and the aim is to reach some 100 million users in a key place: mobile. More specifically, the initial target is both surprising and awesome: mobile Safari. ..... Facebook is about to launch a mobile platform aimed squarely at working on the iPhone (and iPad). But it won’t be distributed through the App Store as a native application, it will be entirely HTML5-based and work in Safari. ....... to use Apple’s own devices against them to break the stranglehold they have on mobile app distribution. With nearly 700 million users, Facebook is certainly in the position to challenge the almighty App Store distribution mechanism. ........ games to news-reading apps. ..... Imagine loading up the mobile web version of Facebook and finding a drop-down for a new type of app. Clicking on one of the apps loads it (from whatever server it’s on depending on the app-maker), and immediately a Facebook wrapper is brought in to surround the app. This wrapper will give the app some basic Facebook functionality, as well as the ability to use key Facebook elements — like Credits. ...... Facebook was placing a huge emphasis on making it easier for game developers to build with HTML5 as opposed to Flash (like Zynga and others currently do). The culmination of this will be Project Spartan. ....... goal is to get people using Facebook as the distribution model for games and other apps, not the App Store (or any other distribution hub). ...... Twitter will be the big single sign-on partner for iOS, not Facebook, even though that’s a key area of focus for them. So they’re taking the fight to the browser.
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