Stormy Glide

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!