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Comment by MatthewB | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't dropbox be a little nervous?

Meh? Large scale storage on Internet servers has been around since the '90s. Dropbox is important because of the user experience, which iCloud doesn't really address. You think the Windows client for iCloud is going to be as seamless as Dropbox? I bet the difference is so big my mom can articulate it.

Rdio, on the other hand, just got smote.

The difference might be big for current users of dropbox, but iCloud could make it harder to convince new icloud users to give dropbox a try.

Rdio did not just get "smote", IMO. Without streaming, my desire to use iTunes matching or iCloud for music in general is lacking. Streaming is where it's at, for me.

Not sure if Rdio's been smoted. I mean, I can get any song I want at any time on any device with rdio for a low monthly price. iTunes is still charging me to own songs, and my selection is still bound by the storage capacity of my device.

RDio is still a much better option than iTunes, Google Music or the Amazon music locker, IMO.

Rdio is still a great deal if you're the kind of person who listens to Yeasayer or Joan As Police Woman. It is no longer as good a deal for the kind of person who listens to Fleetwood Mac and Lady Gaga. The problem is, there are way more of the latter than the former.

More importantly, Rdio already had a lot of noise it had to spend money to cut through. What happens to their cost of customer acquisition after iCloud and iTunes Match?

I just don't see how they're remotely close to the same thing. But opinions are opinions -- Rdio combines the ease of discovery of a service like Pandora with the selection of a decent music store. And that it can locally cache songs on a device means, well, why would I ever buy songs on iTunes again.

Granted, I have terrible taste in music (TERRIBLE), and maybe somebody who is a bit more sophisticated will have a better experience with iTunes. For me though, Rdio answers the desire: I can listen to any song I want wherever I want whenever I want, with one flat monthly fee.

iTunes can't do that. With iTunes, I can listen to a song I want, between 5-20 minutes from now, unless I've purchased it already. And synced it. Cloud or computer, what's dumb about apple's solution is that as far as I know, they haven't taken the sync out of the equation. You're just syncing with the cloud rather than your computer.

As a mostly-satisfied Rdio subscriber, I'm happy to be wrong about this, but I think Apple just put a shotgun blast through 80% of the "cloud music" market. I think people who really see value in getting instant access to any music every year is a small subset of the whole digital music market.

True. Streaming is great and all but I wanted a monthly fee for all music...not a yearly fee to stream music I already have and/or purchase.

Spotify and Mog Music does this now

3Months Rdio User: What I hate about rdio is music disappearance. License changes. Hopefully apple has a stronger relationship and a full song won't go 30 seconds as fast as rdio's does

I use rdio, and it's not the streaming that makes me keep paying them--it's the legal access to a mountainous library of most of the music I ever have a reason to give a listen to.

I will probably keep paying Rdio, but I also recognize that I am in a minority of listeners that constantly listens to new stuff.

Before this announcement, Rdio had a huge value proposition even for normal people: instant access to all the music in their collection from multiple devices. Now iTMS has the same offering, for less money, and with better integration into every platform normal people play music on.

Rdio will undoubtably be faster at delivering a "random song", that is, one that's not already downloaded to your device.

Often times I'll be somewhere remote and want to listen to an album I haven't listened to in months. Without having to download each file first, Rdio starts playing instantly.

I'm not killing my Rdio account either, but that doesn't mean iCloud isn't going to be terribly painful for them.

I'd actually argue that now that Apple's trajectory wrt cloud music is pretty clear, Rdio and MOG probably are breathing a bit easier that they can fill a niche without worrying about iTMS just outright replacing them.

I think Rdio will be fine, given that Grooveshark has been around in the same space, does all the same things as Rdio, and is free.

A service that syncs any file you want across basically every platform imaginable, compared to a service for just iOS that syncs a subset of files and data from a handful of apps?

I wouldn't be worried at all.

What if there is a windows client in the works, or itunes integration? I think Dropbox should really be worried here ...

iTunes integration? I'd rather light myself on fire than have some other reason I'm forced to waste 2GB of memory for an Apple product.

It works on Windows and has a windows API. For instance Photo Stream uses "My Pictures" folder.

Weird. I've never had a double post before.

iCloud doesn't allow me to share files between people. (I have to resort to emailing them. Yuck.)

I also can't share folders of documents relating to a particular project. As a web designer, I might have a PSD for the design, some Word docs for the copy, a PDF of some flyer I have to convert to a web page, and a Keynote presentation to pitch a particular feature to management. With iCloud, I can't view these documents as one collective project. Files are stored per application, not per project.

Dropbox does all of this today, without the need for my applications to be updated or me to rethink how I store files. I think they're going to be just fine.

Dropbox is designed to make your filesystem available on any device. iCloud is designed to make the filesystem invisible.

iCloud might win in the long term, but for now they address fundamentally different problems.

The caveats actually make me happy that Dropbox is out there, not locked in to any particular device.

That said, if this were to force Dropbox to drop their prices, I wouldn't be unhappy...

Only when the windows client comes. I hope it's portable, with SSL.

Unlikely, much of Apple's current strategy seems to be in lock-in.

It seems developers can use APIs in both Mac and Pc. I see no reason why there will not be a third party client for iClouds in Windows.

I'll believe it when I see it. Just like there aren't any 3rd-party FaceTime clients, and I guess there won't be any iMessage clients either.

Currently all major players are competing on who manages to build the most closed ecosystem. I hope this is a phase that will pass.

They showed a Windows computer with pictures from iCloud during the keynote.

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