This, I predict, is going to turn out to be Apple's achilles heel. They make great hardware and their software is good enough but they just don't get services.
Google does services better than anybody and they're quickly closing the other gaps.
Maybe people try to use it for more than this?
Go ahead, make a keynote deck, or numbers spreadsheet. Save it to "the cloud," now go look at your ipad or iphone. Where the hell is it? So much for magic.
Sharing is a royal pain in the ass with iOS. The gyrations I have to go through to move data from an ios app to the desktop is ridiculous and often impossible.
I'm hopeful they will get iCloud up to spec eventually, but for now it just sucks.
The App Store and iTunes Store are pretty damned successful services, whether you like them or not.
iCloud is not a joke, it does it's job well for the 99%. I turn on my new phone, enter my apple id, and I have all my settings, apps, etc synced and ready to go.
The other interesting data point is the bidding for the new TLDs in summer 2012 (http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/rss/1136468/Amazon-G...). Amazon and Google bidded on 150+ new TLDs between them. Apple? With $120bn in the bank, they applied for... .apple. Even Microsoft understood the potential importance of this more than Apple (they applied for 5 or so - .live, .docs, .bing etc).
Yeah this is the thing exactly. Amazon and Google are essentially content plays in mobile. Devices can come and go but as long as people are using their services they're making money.
Apple is a hardware play and that gave them a big first-mover advantage but unless they can keep coming up with iPhone/iPad level home runs that advantage deteriorates quickly. I will never buy anything in iBooks, for example, because I don't want to be limited to Apple's devices to read my books, even if I do currently have an iPhone, iPad and MBA.
They do have some platform tie-in with iTunes Music but the writing is on the wall there. Subscription models are the way forward.
Same for magazines and book. I keep a few subscriptions but mainly consume the content once. When I find a good book, one I will read again I put it on my library shelf and come back to it later. Subscriptions for media lock me into a singe channel if I ever want to go back. And like Netflix, who has to negotiate with the content providers for their content, with subscriptions there is no guarantee the 5-10% of quality content I like will be there when I come back.
You must not have used iTunes Match on a daily basis. Very often some songs do not play at all, no matter how often you retry. Every week or so I cannot connect to the 'iTunes Cloud' at all, reducing my music library to what I have downloaded. Match and iTunes in the cloud are terribly broken.