Apple's iCloud: A Lot of Hype, or Something Different?

Apple's iCloud service has generated quite a buzz, especially for something that no one outside of Apple really knows much about. To be fair though, any time Apple throws its hat into the ring, speculation builds to a fever pitch. Such is the Apple lore surrounding anything Steve Jobs and his crew touch. The fact is that Apple has by and large a stellar track record, especially over the last 15 years, of introducing exciting new and paradigm-shifting products. However, will the iCloud service be something new, or will it be like the other cloud services?

In the past I've gone on the record as being unimpressed with the entire idea of cloud storage. It's a costly off-site hard drive at the end of the day; and for my money, it's much more cost effective to buy an external hard drive. USB drives of up to 1 terabyte in size are much more affordable than they were even 18 months ago. As always, it will be up to Apple how much more depth their service has, and whether that depth will translate into a good value for its consumers.

One way Apple can set itself apart is in exactly what kind of content is available to stream through their cloud. If they are able to let you put any of your content purchased through iTunes (like movies and TV shows for instance) into your cloud and available for download onto your laptop or desktop PC, or better yet TV, that could set them apart. One advantage that Apple clearly has is a loyal and huge consumer base that is already tapped into iTunes. Building functionality off of the iTunes platform would be a genius stroke.

If Apple also lets its consumers push content purchased or pulled from CDs that will be another leg-up they can get on Amazon. Part of what makes Amazon's cloud service less valuable is its requirement that content come from Amazon only. The logic of course is that cloud service providers don't want to be sued by the record labels for allowing users to keep pirated content on their servers.

Apple will also have to take on Pandora, last.fm and many other on-line streaming radio stations that offer essentially the same thing: streaming music tailored to the listener's tastes. Cloud services, in the face of sites like Pandora must push the fact that this is your own content, so nothing could be more personalized than your own stuff.

Maybe the biggest advantage Apple has over its competitors are its fan-boys (and fan-girls of course). The cult of Apple is quite strong, and there are many who will sign up for the service just because it's another Apple service. Historically Apple has always seemed less concerned with reaching every consumer, and more concerned with pleasing those who "get" the Apple philosophy. Perhaps it really doesn't matter how different iCloud is from Amazon Cloud or Google's Cloud service. We'll all know a lot more next week, that's for sure.