iCloud may not be a threat to online storage services

A herd of start-ups officially learned they had a new rival when Apple introduced its iCloud online storage service on Monday.

People will be able to store documents, presentations, photos, digital books and apps in a Web-based locker and get access to them from their Internet-connected devices, Apple said.

It is a niche that has plenty of competition. The rival companies are all trying to help people get into documents saved on their computers, smartphones and tablets without having to e-mail files to themselves.

The question is whether Apple, with its huge base of customers and deep pockets, will squash the companies already in the niche, like Dropbox, Box.net and Cx.com. The technology giants Microsoft and Amazon also have similar online storage services.

Maybe Apple will kill them all. But an early look at iCloud, which is supposed to be available sometime in the fall, makes this unlikely.

Steven P Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, showed off iCloud at his company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, by talking about how it automatically stores files. He also spoke about how the service makes updated versions of those files available on any device a user owns, a process known as synchronisation, or syncing for short.

The audience at the conference — largely Apple fanatics and developers who build on top of its products — applauded Jobs’s presentation. But left untouched was the issue of whether people would be able to store all kinds of file formats in iCloud, and not just Apple’s.

Jobs demonstrated the service using Apple’s word processor, Pages, along with Numbers and Presentations. Apple’s calendar, contacts and e-mail are also compatible.

There was no mention of Microsoft Office software like Word and Excel or Adobe Acrobat. If it doesn’t work with those applications, iCloud would have limited utility for many people.

Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box.net, an online storage company, pointed out in a blog post after the announcement that the shortcoming would be particularly problematic for business customers, who often use a variety of file formats.

“The first issue with iCloud is that it will be optimised to work with other Apple products,” he wrote. “The de facto difficulty with Apple is that they are laser-focused on their own ecosystem.”

He continued: “This is fine in the consumer world, where we tend to have considerable flexibility in selecting our own software and hardware. But in the enterprise we’re typically using devices, platforms, operating systems, and software that come from an array of vendors — and not always of our choosing.”

Apple said consumers would be able to store documents in iCloud that use Apple’s iCloud Storage APIs, or technical specifications. Maybe other major companies will make their products available using those rules, but Apple only announced those specifications on Monday.

©2011 The New York
Times News Service