Stormy Glide

I was in a meeting this afternoon when I suddenly found I had two miss calls from my wife and a couple more from my friends. I started getting worried since my wife and I have this “code” – one miss call means I can wait if you’re in a meeting; but two miss calls mean urgent matters. So I walked out of the conference room and called her back. The first sentence she said was “did you see the news?” I immediately thought about something that I didn’t want to happen… and it’s indeed what happened. As a long time user of Apple products and an admirer of Steve Jobs, I felt so sad.

Back in the early 90s, computers were not popular in China. Our school had only one Apple II computer and a dozen of its clones. I was lucky enough to be able to use that Apple II. It was the first computer I have used and it was the best memory I can recall now about my elementary school. Thank you, Steve.

Steve did not only redefine computers, or music players, or phones, or tablets. Most importantly, he redefined how people interact with technologies, which is fundamental to every consumer product. To improve technologies is hard, but to make them easy to use is even harder. Many people didn’t realize it; Steve did, and he proved it by Apple’s huge success.

A while ago, a Chinese press company was recruiting people to translate Steve’s bio. I wanted to participate and thus translated his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech into Chinese. I love every piece of that speech. I eventually gave up, because I didn’t have time to do it at all. I wish I could have done it…

San Diego was gloomy and rainy today, which is very very rare. It turned out to be a really sad day indeed. I cannot believe that I’m so deeply affected by a person’s death who I haven’t even met. RIP, Steve Jobs. You did what you wanted to – change the world with what you have created, but that’s just a part of your achievement. More importantly, you have influenced and inspired a lot of people, and I’m certainly one of them. Thank you!

We put a card and candles in front of a nearby Apple Store. RIP, Steve.

Marc Andreessen at D9 (via @bill_gross):

Startups should focus on really bold ideas. They might fail, but at least if they win, they’ll be big/impactful.

The exact same thing applies to doing research.

Today, Apple pre-announced the keynote in WWDC, which will be given by Steve Jobs (Hooray!), unveiling the new Mac OS X – Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud. People immediately started responding by speculating what iCloud will look like. Here is my two cents.

First, I think the key is seamless integration with the two operating system upgrades. By “seamless”, I meant SEAMLESS. The user should not need to do much additional planning or configuration in order to store their stuff in iCloud. For example, I want to use iTune as how I do it today even if the content lives in iCloud. iPhoto and iMovie are two other examples. Seamless integration with iPhoto means that I import pictures from camera and iPhoto does the rest to talk to iCloud automatically. Then I can pick some pictures to make a gallery or send to my friends. Simple like this.

Second, iCloud will first focus on storing media purchased from the iTune store, like music, movies or TV shows. One obvious benefit is to encourage people buy more from the iTune store. Moreover, storing purchases from the iTune store actually does not bring much additional storage to Apple’s data center. But the bottom line is that iCloud will provide no less than what MobileMe can do today.

Third, iCloud will emphasize more on sync across multiple devices, less on backup. So I don’t think iCloud will work like a full disk back up tool, such as CrashPlan. It will still work more like iDisk or DropBox. However, that’s bad, because it means users need to make plans, i.e., they need to think about which files to put in local disk and which files to put in iCloud. Let’s see what Apple will come up with to make it easier.

Forth, iCloud will emphasize more on sharing, less on collaboration. I don’t think collaboration is a huge focus today for personal computing, but sharing is. But again, sharing would become even easier if iCloud seamlessly works with two new OS upgrades.

Will iCloud be only about storage in cloud or also computation in cloud? This will be very interesting. For example, if iMovie stores data in iCloud, can they do the movie rendering also in iCloud instead of on local machine? I don’t think the first release of iCloud will do this, but it’s something to expect in the future.

Last but not the least, iCloud will not be completely free. I think it will be free for purchases from iTune and a small amount of storage for a little bit of other things. Users will need to pay for additional storage or features. But I wish it will be cheaper than how much MobileMe costs today ($99/year), which is too steep.

Can’t wait for Jobs’ keynote!