Ok, yes opened this post’s title with the words “Loose Change” because there are so many aspects of the conjecture around Apple’s potential move into a massive and free cloud services offering that it reads a lot like narrative of the 9/11 conspiracy doc of the same name.
Let’s ignore the editorial prominence of the “Apple to Ship Smaller iPhone” headline for the purposes of this discussion, as this to me, is a no brainer.
Will Apple, Inc. morph its lame pay-to-play set of relatively feeble web crap as a massive new social cloud service with a freemium business model? That IS the question…
Here’s what we know:
1. Apple built its largest “iDataCenter” in Maiden, North Carolina about two years ago. It’s 5x their previous largest space. Here is some aerial surveillance courtesy of a local realtor:
The DataCenterKnowledge.com article states this space is;
“expected to provide the back-end for a larger move into cloud computing, with most speculation focusing on a shift of iTunes user libraries from user desktops to online storage.”
Sounds like a strong lead…Don’t really care so much about the iTunes thing just yet, but let’s not quibble with DataCenterKnowledge.com on the actual purpose…Since the specifics of Apple’s product tactical aren’t in their bailiwick.
2. Apple acquired LaLa. I wrote a post about this acquisition about 9 months ago and in it, I say:
IMHO, this was about the acquisition of talent by Apple, and using that talent to improve their existing products…And perhaps their existing streaming content line…Certainly work to be done…
I agreed with the TechCrunch report, which cited a quote from an unidentified Apple source who claimed this was an engineering acquisition and so the “existing products” may now indeed turn out to be a combination of iTunes functions inside MobileMe. More on this later.
3. Apple acquired Siri and PlaceBase. There isn’t a lot of speculation as to why, the functions of these two companies, namely voice commands and mapping are from an end user perspective pretty obvious. The Siri demo, see the video below, has an interesting twist in its offering of semantic or natural language search capabilities. More on this later.
The Placebase “white label” mapping platform formerly called “pushpin” included layer creation/control, but also allowed for a “stacking of data” or a structured repository including “social, financial, weather” et al. There was also a commercial API, and they were about to launch a free API. VERY interesting. Former CEO Jaron Waldman’s demo is below:
Apple also has a record for creating/acquiring redundancies in services/application offerings so as not place itself in a beholden position for certain technologies. Examples include iWork vs. Office and iLife vs. Adobe/Avid – certainly a voice recognition/mapping combo + data center would be a nice backup plan should Apple move into a more adversarial role say vs. Google? Oh right, that’s happened.
4. Apple filed a patent for “A Cloud Based Safety Deposit Box” in Q3 of 2009. A virtual “Time Machine”? Will Apple offer us a 100GB of storage in the cloud? Jim Dalrymple over at The Loop doesn’t think so. What about making iDisk more like Dropbox with regard to streaming/file sharing? More on this too…
5. Why we may never know, but the The Wall St. Journal and The New York Times may have both burried the headline in reporting this past week that Apple was indeed working on a revision of MobileMe. The Times saying Apple was “actively building a more versatile version of its MobileMe service…” – And the WSJ saying, “Social networking would be another key component.” Certainly bigger news than a smaller/larger/cheaper iPhone in my humble opinion.
6. Apple has a track record of doing away with fading technologies ahead of the industry, optical drives in MacBook Air machines are the latest/best example. Now it would appear hard drive storage is the next target, moving those fairly expensive BOM elements upscale, into the price of iPhone, iPad and MacBook lines while also employing a bit of marketing slight of hand, by using the more expensive SSD technology in lieu of the old, easily damaged and slower head/platton versions. The purpose for this move is clearly to accelerate the death of optical, including Blu-Ray, (a notably absent technology from Apple products) and to drive the adoption of streaming services tied to inexpensive trojan horse products, namely AppleTV, iPad and possibly a new storage free iPhone. The increased cost of SSD is likely in reality fairly minimal by Apple standards, given their stranglehold on the SSD market and volumes they purchase. (more…)
