Why iCloud?

I am increasingly glad that I left Apple to do other things. And I am sure Apple will continue to make more money for a while. But one has to wonder.

Here is a company dedicated to the "Wow!". The stars in their developer teams create these applications that you launch and, really, they are beautiful. They are only 85% finished, but they look good and one does not see the problems until a few days later. Then, hey, you already bought it. They have a Support group to make you feel better about this. And you can file bugs. And wait for the next version. But that's about it.

There was only one place in Apple that spoke about things like MTBF and that actually measured things like reliability. That was the server group. You know, the one whose products got deprecated and that is probably mostly gone at this point. Apple's apps are known for the elegance of their UIs and not for reliability. Everyone else at Apple says "You re-boot and your problem is gone? Problem solved." And these are the people that are going to build a cloud-based music service?

The important people at Apple used to design things, create standards, carve beauty out of technological crap. Now, the important people are going to be running a data center full of HP machines. In North Carolina. It is truly sad.

Of course, iCloud is a good idea for Apple. You used to pay for your music, own your music, and hold your music. With the iTunes Store, you pay for your music and hold your music and Apple owns your music. Now, with iCloud, you pay for your music, Apple holds your music and Apple owns your music. And this is a good deal. Why is Apple doing this? They might say, "because iCould."