Ben Bajarin:
The fallacy most make when critiquing Apple’s service challenge is to believe that Apple needs to out-innovate competing services. The truth is, all they need to do is out-integrate them.
Integration is a huge part of Apple’s advantage, but its services still need to offer what users want. For instance, I was impressed with the OS X Maps demo where you can look up an address and send it to your iPhone. That type of integration will win people over. However, you still have people that use Dropbox because they feel it’s better than iCloud.
This comment misses the point, I think. Dropbox isn’t necessarily BETTER but it is different. I spend far too much time in Dropbox working with files and Apple has no answer, no solution to the file-system conundrum.
Well, they do. Apple doesn’t want you to have to worry about files at all. Apple wants you to worry about content. And they have an answer to that, it just doesn’t work. Maybe 10.9/7.0.
Until they can make that work across all the apps you wind up with things silo’d inside iCloud. The requisite staging to an intermediary app such as pages to get at the content, just to paste it elsewhere, seems needlessly fussy. I still don’t think people see Dropbox as inherently better, if anything I see it as a necessary evil until Apple can revolutionize the file system for mobile. 1pass and apps like Scrivener have bet on Dropbox, so how will this affect Apple’s decisions going forward if Dropbox is the de-facto standard.
Jim, I don’t think sending directions your to iPhone from Maps in OS X is going to “win people over” simply because that function has been available in available in Google Maps for Android users for quite some time, and has been available for iPhone users since Google released their own Maps app.
But that sort of integration WHEN it is something that Apple does, but competitors do not IS what will win people over. There are plenty of other examples:
1) Ease of backup solution on iOS — restore any device to the state of your previous (or lost) device. With iCloud backups, the setup is even easier — no need to even hook to iTunes (though I still prefer that since I can use TimeMachine to pull back old backups of my iPhone or iPad if need be). While we are at it, TimeMachine is still the best pre-installed backup solution. Just connect an external drive and TimeMachine asks you if its for backup, you answer “yes” and you are done.
2) Making a phone call and simply converting it to a Facetime call mid-stream without hanging up with no need to setup an online account of any kind (with iPhone, Facetime works with just your phone number, you don’t even need iCloud). With an iCloud account it works with Mac, iPad and iPod Touch as well.
3) iMessage being directly integrated into Messages app side-by-side with SMS. No need to pick a service, iMessage just happens if possible and SMS is the fall-back service. iMessage from my Mac has been awesome since I work on my Mac all day and I can screen shot things on the Mac and paste them right into iMessage.
4) Reminders and Calendar seamless integrated from iPhone to iPad to OS X. No matter what Google does in phones and tablets, they simply don’t have a great desktop solution since it is not pre-installed. Installing Google Desktop is easy, but 90% of people will not know to take that step. With OS X, that integration comes built-in.
I could go on, and I probably missed some great examples. The Maps thing just makes sense, but if you are a Google Maps user you have seen the “send to my phone” button for quite some time in Google Maps.
Yeah, I’m not disagreeing with anything you said, really. Only saying Apple does have an answer. It’s just, as you say, different.
And Apple’s solution only works with Lion or Mountain Lion. Nothing earlier. Except XP!!!
iWork in the Cloud is the first hint of what Apple needs to do to show they are serious about services. They need to run on all platforms. But Apple is still resisting.
Apple will not be able to compete with Google on services if they restrict themselves to iOS and OS X. It just leaves out too much of the world.
When Apple launched iTunes over a decade ago, they recognized that it needed to run on Windows. Yet today they offer an iCloud API that gives developers no way to target Android or Windows.
It just doesn’t work. You can’t compete in the services arena if you ignore half the world. You can’t offer a cloud solution that gives you no landing point on half of the earth.