The Fanatical ABCs of Apple's Genius Training

Via Gizmodo

From Disney to Ritz Carlton to Apple - great customer experiences don’t happen by accident. As I’ve said before, every brand, especially every service brand, has a customer experience. The question is just how well thought out it is, and whether it meets both the needs of customers and the company. For too many companies, their customer experience is incompletely thought through and too much is left to chance. Or too often it’s believed that great customer experiences just happen without reason or control, or just stem from a company’s particular DNA. None of which are true.

Leave it to Apple to go to great lengths to work on the “how well thought out it is” part. As with most other things Apple, this Genius training exhibits fanatical attention to detail.

Gizmodo has gotten its hands on a training manual for Genius staff, and it’s 100 or so pages to cover a 14 day course, including everything from diagnostic protocols to mild social engineering.  (It has to be said, the cover of the manual is not up to Apple design snuff. Not at all.)

The point of this bootcamp is to fill you up with Genius Actions and Characteristics, listed conveniently on a “What” and “How” list on page seven of the manual. What does a Genius do? Educates. How? “Gracefully.” He also “Takes Ownership” “Empathetically,” “Recommends” “Persuasively,” and “Gets to ‘Yes’” “Respectfully.” The basic idea here, despite all the verbiage, is simple: Become strong while appearing compassionate; persuade while seeming passive, and empathize your way to a sale.

No need to mince words: This is psychological training. There’s no doubt the typical trip to the Apple store is on another echelon compared to big box retail torture; Apple’s staff is bar none the most helpful and knowledgable of any large retail operation. A fundamental part of their job—sans sales quotas of any kind—is simply to make you happy. But you’re not at a spa. You’re at a store, where things are bought and sold. Your happiness is just a means to the cash register, and the manual reminds trainees of that: “Everyone in the Apple Store is in the business of selling.” Period.

Ah, the old adage, ABC - “Always Be Closing”.

Read much more at Gizmodo.

Switching from iPhone to Android

With my departure from frog I needed to replace the iPhone 4S that I’d been using, and decided to try making the switch to Android. I’ve been curious about Android phones for a while and this this was as good an opportunity as any to give one a go. Ideally I would have waited till after the iPhone 5 came out later this year to make my choice,  but I couldn’t delay that long. So I got an HTC One X instead, a phone that I first saw at Mobile World Congress and which I thought was the first really desirable Android device. Here are some early thoughts on the experience so far.

Choosing Sides

First off I’ll say that I’ve been reminded of the Cold War: back in those days, smaller countries had to choose whether to align themselves with one of the two superpowers, America or the Soviet Union, and along with that would come an ideology. It’s much the same way now for consumers with digital ecosystems. One ecosystem can’t do everything, but in general one must choose sides to get invested in, and that leads to the religious wars. I’m not a fanboy of anything, though I’m a user of Macs since the Mac SE, and have had an on-again, off-again relationship with the iPhone. To Apple’s credit, they fixed most of the things I complained about in that 2009 post, which is why I got an iPhone 4S, and it was a solid product.

But I have been gradually moving away from the Apple superpower for a variety of reasons, none of which individually are show-stoppers, but which collectively add up to a less than enchanting future:

• .Mac/Mobile Me/iCloud - too many transitions, badly handled.
• Recent strong-arm tactics about system/device/application updates moving in lock-step, some of which I can understand but others which seem arbitrary and purely for Apple’s benefit, not mine (e.g iCloud breaking functionality that used to work fine, unless you have a recent Mac with Lion).
• General lack of open-ness and transparency (rules for the app store being one example).
• The Mac App store pushing sandboxing of applications, with likely deleterious effects. Yes, you can still buy direct from the developer, but you can see where this is going.
• In the recent desktop OS’s, all the goofy skeumorphism (I joke that Mac OS 2012 = General Magic 1994), childish animations (dear God, what’s with the bouncy dialog boxes and email windows flying in and out?), and default choices like reversing scroll direction and hiding scroll bars. And Mountain Lion is a UI mess, with iOS elements stuck in that don’t visually blend. I remember when designers complained about the two window styles in older versions of Mac OS, the brushed steel and plain gray - where are the complaints now?).
• A general feeling that Apple has changed from scrappy underdog to dominant bully. Apple is no longer the iconoclastic choice but has become the safe mainstream choice…It seems to want to control everything, even though it shouldn’t it.

I haven’t bought music from iTunes in ages (I use a combination of Amazon and Google Play). Chrome has become my browser, and for me that was the gateway drug to getting more into Google’s ecosystem. I’m not giving up on Mac as my laptop any time soon (despite the above complaints), but for my phone I was intrigued to look elsewhere. Silellak’s article at The Verge, 29 Days with Android, mirrors some of my own thoughts too, though I haven’t gone to the same tinkering lengths he has.

Enter the HTC One X

The HTC One X comes with Android 4.0 (codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, or ICS for short), skinned with HTC Sense, which generally has a fairly light touch to it compared to older versions of Sense. Let’s put it this way - it has less cutesy graphics and animation than Apple’s desktop OS… Having a phone with ICS puts me in the minority as only 7% of Android phones currently have it. But heck I was proudly part of the 3% market share that Apple used to have in the PC market, so I’m used to being in the minority.

My One X has been through a bit of a torture test in its first couple of weeks as I am also temporarily without a laptop for the first time in years, so the phone has been my primary device for Web, email and so on.

Luckily the One X has a large screen (4.7”, 1280x720 pixels so 312 pixel density) which has made this much easier,  not just for viewing but also for typing. (The entire iPhone can almost fit inside the screen of the One X). The One X feels lighter and skinnier than its dimensions imply because of how it’s shaped - it definitely feels slimmer than the iPhone (also in real life iPhones are as much as half an inch bigger than Apple says because they have cases…) The One X is relatively large and it took me a couple of days to get used to, but it now feels fine.

Speaking of typing, I swapped out the standard HTC keyboard for Swiftkey keyboard (one of the appealing things about Android is you can customize almost anything). This thing is like crack it’s so good. It learns as you type and gets creepily good at predicting your next word. It also provides multiple auto complete options as soon as you start typing a word rather than one option when you get far into a word (as in iOS). I’m about as fast on Swiftkey as I was on my old BlackBerry Bold with its physical keyboard. I haven’t tried the beta version of the upcoming Swiftkey but it looks to be even better (don’t even need to hit the spacebar, it figures it out). The haptic feedback on key presses is genuinely useful, somewhat to my surprise. When long-pressing a key to get to a “shift” character (e.g. a/@) you don’t have to look to see if the @ has taken effect, you can just wait for the secondary vibration.

Left: Lockscreen. Right: Homescreen. Click to enlarge

Once you get used to the size, the One X itself is nicer to hold than the iPhone as it’s more rounded and the plastic back is matte finished so it’s more grippy, and the rounded edges fit more naturally in the hand (also makes it much easier to get in and out of pants pockets). Plus I don’t feel compelled to get a case, which I did for the iPhone even though it offended my sensibilities. The fact that it’s so necessary for the iPhone indicates to me as a designer that it’s a poor design - it’s like getting a nice looking car and then covering the entire thing - not just the front bumper - in a bra with just the windows exposed. What’s the point?

Music transfer and syncing with iTunes is easy thanks to Doubletwist, and it can also sync via wifi. Doubletwist also manages my podcasts directly on the phone so I don’t have to wait to sync with the laptop to get the latest Fresh Air episode.

The Google Play store is, despite its awkward name, a good browsing experience, certainly visually more pleasant than the iTunes storefront for finding both music and apps. Apps can be installed over the air either from a desktop browser or of course directly on the phone. The music catalog is not nearly as large as iTunes for now but the bitrates are much higher so the quality is better. My iTunes catalog is now uploaded and over the air streaming is a doddle. The Google desktop “application” for syncing between cloud and PC is a joke however - it works, but it’s far from intuitive or flexible.

Sound quality from the audio jack is slightly better than the iPhone. The One X has Beats audio which does help with cheapo earphones, but with a good pair of phones and Beats turned off the sound is noticeably richer than the iPhone (I did a side by side comparison).

Upsides

There are a few other things that I prefer about the experience so far:

• Widgets/screen customization: I love having quick access to key information, and also making adjustments like wifi, airplane mode, etc. Android gives you lots of customization over screen layout, and you aren’t locked into a grid of app icons justified top/left. Now I’ve got things arranged, I rarely need to dive into the main list of apps.
• Social integration: I like how contacts are linked to their social profiles (automatically or you can pick and choose), and I also prefer how sending photos or links to Twitter or Facebook launches those actual apps rather than the half-baked in-app interstitial versions that you get with the same sharing action on the iPhone.
• Smart dial: Start typing someone’s name on the letters of 9-digit dial pad and you get their number, rather than having to dive into your contact list. BlackBerrys do this and I couldn’t believe the iPhone lacked it (I found a alternative dialer in the app store that could, but it was janky)
• Chrome: Since this is my desktop browser, having it on the phone too is great as it syncs history and tabs with my laptop (looks like Safari will be doing the same things soon). Chrome more often loads mobile versions of pages than Safari which I prefer for mobile browsing - easier to read, faster to load - but the full versions of the sites are a menu pick away. It’s definitely still beta and lacks some polish (and a history list!), but overall really good.
• Camera: The image quality is at least as good as the iPhone (though I’m sure Apple will up the ante with the 5), but beyond that it’s the other features that are great: hold down the shutter button for continuous shooting; take full res still images while shooting video (no mode switching); and the ability to adjust the default exposure settings (I’ve dialed down saturation and contrast a notch as the images are a bit hot for my taste otherwise). I use Lightroom rather than iPhoto or Aperture so my photo transfer process is no harder than it was on the iPhone (I was shocked that the iPhone didn’t automatically back up photos and videos to the Mac).
• Car mode: This is really well done, giving you fast, easy access to key functions such as phone, music and navigation (including voice turn by turn and 3d maps). An HTC dock automatically puts the phone in this mode. In my new job I’m going to be commuting by car so this will be great.
• Settings: I never liked how on the iPhone settings are clustered together, separate from the app they are related to, as this could lead to some cumbersome back and forth between screens. In Android, settings/preferences are controlled within the app.
• Gesture search: A neat way of finding stuff on your phone, analogous to spotlight on the Mac or iPhone , except you draw letters crudely on the screen until you get what you want, so it’s faster than typing. It learns as you use it and puts frequently accessed items at the top of the results list (more like Launchbar, which I use on my Mac).
• Evernote: One of my most used apps,  and it’s considerably better on Android than the iPhone (text editing and formatting are far better).
• Email and Calendar: I didn’t like the HTC stock email or calendar apps that much, so I grabbed the stock Ice Cream Sandwich calendar, and an app called Maildroid that pulls together Gmail, IMAP and POP accounts into one interface, and it also allows rich text editing of messages. 
• Battery life: So far this has been excellent, somewhat better than I was getting with my iPhone. I easily get a day out of it when primarily using wifi, even with the very heavy usage due to my laptop-less condition. I fully expect I could go a day and a half, maybe even 2 days in more normal usage. Still, nightly charging is a good habit.

13+ hours of heavy use, 25% battery still to go. Click to enlarge

Downsides

Are there some downsides? Sure:

[Update: This is now fixed.] Multitasking isn’t as smooth as on the iPhone, you feel like you’re waiting for a moment when switching, and in Chrome pages often refresh when you return to the browser, which is annoying. It looks like for the AT&T version of the phone, HTC has instituted an aggressive scheme of killing background tasks, which definitely is annoying when it kills music running in the background. I do prefer the dedicated app switching button on the phone though (just as I like having a dedicated Back button). This is my only significant gripe with the phone so far. On balance, though, I don’t think the time on task is significantly different than the iPhone, it just feels longer.

It does take longer to get working with a Mac (especially if you are all-in on Apple’s ecosystem, and use iPhoto and all the other stuff) but you can have basically the same experience (at least for my fairly narrow usage). HTC offers wireless accessories that mimic Airplay streaming/screen mirroring, but it’s not an all-in-one solution if you are using other devices.

Siri is missing, but I don’t care as I could never get it to work properly, maybe it was fooled by my blended English/American accent. After a few comically bad attempts, I stopped using it. For other people I suppose this will be a bigger deal. The voice transcription for texts and search is quite good in Android.

Sum-Up

We’ll see how the phone holds up over the next few months, but for right now I’m pretty happy.

Raising the Bar, Learning from Failure, and Other Lessons from Steve

After a crazy couple of weeks in the consumer electronics/smartphone/computer/telecom mega-industry (it’s really all one now), another bombshell arrived yesterday with the news that Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO and is taking on role of chairman of the board. In reality, it probably means he will be in an advising capacity not unlike what he’s probably been doing for the last year while on medical leave. But still, a shock to the system.

The fact that he’s been able to carry on having any significant executive role at Apple is testament to how passionate and dedicated he is to the company. For quite a long time now he’s had another full-time job (and I’m not talking Pixar or being on the board of Disney): fighting cancer. Best wishes to you in that challenge, Steve.

There’s a lot of speculation on how Apple will do now that Jobs is no longer at the helm. I for one think it will do just fine for quite a while - it’s got a very solid culture that will endure, huge momentum in the market, no debt, probably the strongest brand in the world, and the upper hand in almost every market it’s in.

Setting the Bar Crazy High

All of us in the design and innovation biz have a lot to thank Steve Jobs for. He opened up the play space for us by setting the bar so ridiculously high. This did several things:

• It set a standard for quality, invention, and consistency that inspired others (including us at frog), and allowed much greater latitude for pushing the boundaries of form, materials and interactions. A staple of client requests in the last decade has been “I want the iPod of [my category]” (which became “I want the iPhone of…” and then “iPad of…”). Meaning of course that they didn’t want a literal iPod, but they wanted the same kind of game-changing product, business opportunity, and user experience which these devices came to represent. Most companies, however, underestimate how difficult that is to do from a cultural, technical, organizational, and business perspective (especially if you want to do this repeatedly, not just a one-off).
• It changed people’s expectations for design, products and experiences even in categories far beyond the ones Apple plays in. A good example is the current trend of consumerization of IT, where expectations about ease of use, flexibility, and joy of use from consumer applications are now being forced onto staid IT systems. Why does the online expense-filing application my company pays a lot of money for have to suck so bad, when the free site I use for sharing photos handles so much more complexity so much more easily?

Failure Can Make You Stronger

In 1965, the Apollo 1 spacecraft caught fire while still on the launchpad, killing all three astronauts. It was a televised, very public failure for NASA as it desperately tried to overtake the Russians for the race to the moon. While it was tragic, it also prompted a critical reassessment of the program that ultimately made it better. Retired astronaut John Young said, “I can assure you if we had not had that fire and rebuilt the command module … we could not have done the Apollo program successfully. So we owe a lot to Gus, and Rog and Ed. They made it possible for the rest of us to do the almost-impossible.”

Jobs has been quite open about the fact that after he was fired from Apple, he went through a difficult period. But ultimately this made him a better leader, and he returned to the company after eleven years quite a different person than he had left it. I think it’s fair to say that Apple is a better and more successful company now than if he’d been at the helm for the entire time.

In his humble, inspiring speech to the graduating class at Stanford, he put it this way:

So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. […]

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. […]

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Spend a lunch break watching the whole thing if you haven’t, it’s worth your while:

Google and Motorola: Will it Blend?

 

The shockwaves of the recent announcement that Google is buying Motorola Mobility, the handset and device division that spun off from the Motorola mother ship not long ago, will continue to ripple far and wide. There are several reasons why this could be a great boost for Android, but also some major concerns about getting the two companies and their product lines to blend well. 

There’s much debate about the reasons behind the acquisition. Was Google looking to boost its patent portfolio to create a Mutually Assured Destruction/Mexican Stand-off scenario (pick your metaphor) in the midst of the tit-for-tat patent suits going on right now? There are arguments on both sides about how worthwhile this gambit is (Yes it is! No it’s not!). There are also arguments that patents are only a piece of the puzzle, and that Moto’s hardware business was also a major part of the logic. I fall into this camp.

Blend the Ecosystem

It seems like years ago that Google’s first phone, the Nexus One, was launched, but it was only 18 months ago. I wrote at the time:

Google’s introduction of Nexus One, a phone to truly call its own, is a completely necessary move for the company. Only by taking ownership of the whole user experience will Google really be able to prove the value of its Android platform.… The lackluster success of the early Android phones has surely made Google realize that they need to take a much stronger role in order to bring all the pieces of the experience together. The catch-as-catch can approach they’ve had so far just isn’t going to cut it. Fragmentation is a death knell for a product like this at this stage of maturity. Google needs to lead the charge with an integrated platform until the experience gap is fully closed. Then it can afford to loosen the reins and let the handset manufacturers, carriers, and third party developers go do their own things independently, safe in the knowledge that they will all come together to create something interesting and valuable for customers.

The underlying rationale here, as I described in that earlier article, is that early in a category’s development (e.g. smartphones, tablets), complex devices, platforms, and ecosystems under-perform user expectations unless they are highly integrated. This creates a gap between the experiences that products can provide and what people want (see diagram). This gap can take time to close as the technologies and platforms improve, and instead of creating a finely blended smoothie, you get a lumpy concoction that’s unpleasant.

Making the platform or ecosystem modular and open too early prolongs the time that a gap exists. Microsoft’s phone OS always suffered from this until a sharp change of course with Phone 7, and Apple quickly trounced them with its integrated offering. The Nexus One was Google’s first step in rectifying its own initial misstep.

The Motorola Mobility acquisition is a huge step further along that progression. Google clearly still feels that the fragmentation and variability of third-party hardware makers (with the frequent intervention of carriers seeking special interfaces, additional apps, and in some cases removing Google’s native apps and services altogether) is leaving money on the table. To be fair, some of the Android handsets have been very good—the Motorola Droids have consistently been strong players—but then there are other products that just completely send the Android/Google brand into the toilet.

This is a cycle that gets repeated in many industries, and the integrated/proprietary vs. modular/open balancing act is one that many companies struggle with as they make strategic choices on investments, alliances, and how to deploy complex products and ecosystems. I devote a significant amount of time to this in my book, Innovation X, as it’s a fascinating area.

The Motorola acquisition also strengthens Google’s position in the new diversity of digital ecosystem touchpoints: set-top boxes, broadband connected TVs, home networking, and phone-based payments (digital wallet). Motorola Mobility already plays in these (mostly immobile) areas, which is interesting to Google because the lines between these products and phones and tablets, in terms of services and content, are increasingly blurred. It’s all about the multi-screen experience today, and making what happens in your home work seamlessly with your devices out on the move. Anybody’s who’s worked in the “smart home” market knows that it’s more dumb than smart, as getting devices to talk together well is really difficult today. Google would love to solve that problem, and is one of the few companies that has the scope and clout to pull it off – even more so now that it has a major player in the hardware endpoints.

Will the Cultures Blend?

Google has said that it will keep Motorola Mobility as a separate company. No doubt this is partly to assuage fears of its other hardware partners that they will be kicked to the curb in favor of the in-house brand. (HTC in particular finds itself in a tough spot now, as both its OS providers now have favored hardware partners—Microsoft/Nokia and Google/Motorola. This latest merger may well push some companies back into the Windows camp as they hedge bets.)

Should Google merge Motorola more fully into its existing business units? In a word: No.

As Google discovered with its early stumbles with Nexus, designing and selling hardware is a really different business than online services, advertising, and software development. Google is amazing at many things, but this does not appear to be one of its talents. Better to keep it under a different brand, with a different team working with the processes it needs to. Which is not to say they should not seek to influence one another, and that there aren’t things Motorola could learn from Google about innovation and development.

Michael Mace has a jaundiced view of this combination:

The same business practices that made Google good in software will be a liability in hardware.  Google’s engineers-first, research driven product management philosophy is effective in the development of web software, because you can run experiments and revise your web app every day in response to user feedback.  But in hardware, you have to make feature decisions 18 months before you ship, and you have to live with those decisions for another 18 months while your product sells through.  You can’t afford to wait for science.  Instead, you need dictatorial product managers who operate on artistry and intuition.  All of those concepts (dictatorship, artistry, intuition) are anathema to Google’s culture.  Either Google’s worldview will dominate and ruin Motorola, or worse yet the Motorola worldview will infect Google.  Google with Motorola inside it is like a python that swallowed a minivan.

To put it another way, I think Google has about as much chance of successfully managing a device business as Nokia had of running an OS business.

I’m not as skeptical as this, but in my view, assuming that Google is not just going to flip Motorola and spin it off again after it’s got the patents, this brings up the biggest question: can the two cultures get along? Motorola is famously stodgy, slow to make decisions, conservative. How will this blend with the more freewheeling West Coast intensity of Google? Maybe the Mobility division was already the wild-and-crazy-guy of Motorola, but I still find it hard to believe that there won’t be significant challenges here.

So far I haven’t seen anyone mention this, which is odd since cultural fit is a) usually one of the first things brought up in large corporate mergers, and, b) the leading cause of them failing.

Things will become clearer in the next few months about what Google plans to do with this acquisition. I think there are some compelling benefits for both brands, but the culture blending question is going to be as big a challenge as anything.

Why iCloud Will be as Important as the iPod

Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference keynote last week will be remembered for two things: the bloodbath of disrupted developers and apps it left in its wake, and that it was as important for cloud services as the iPod was for digital music, and that the iPhone was for smartphones.

The Developer Bloodbath

Despite the many cheers from the crowd of developers at the keynote, I reckon there were several hundred third party developers and apps collectively put on notice (and maybe put out of business) by the various announcements. As the NY Times wryly put it, “How do you know if you’ve created a really great, useful iPhone app? Apple tries to put you out of business.” (The Times provides a handy list of apps now scrambling for a second act.)

In truth, quite a few of the things that Apple announced - such as a basic to-do list app, and ways of storing web articles offline for later reading - have become such fundamental needs for so many people that they deserved to be part of the core OS. Unfortunately they are also the bread and butter of many niches developers who saw the same need and leapt to fill it in the intervening years. They will have to rethink and improve what they do, and many of them will I’m sure.

Such is life in the shadow of an ecosystem behemoth. Apple giveth (App Store to give independent developers more visibility and access) and Apple taketh away (obviating the need for those apps in the first place).

Apple has been pretty consistent in adopting good ideas from third parties into its core offerings. Perhaps most famously, Apple introduced the Dashboard feature (a precursor to the iconized app view on the iPhone), to loud complaints of it ripping off a third party developer, Konfabulator who had created something very similar.

As problematic as this can be, it’s all part of Apple’s plan. Chetan Sharma put it succinctly: “Apple’s goal is to commoditize the software, Microsoft’s goal is to commoditize the hardware, Google - both”

Apple has high tolerance for making software free, even if it makes life painful for its developers, because it makes almost all its profit on hardware. For the time being at least, Apple has enough strength and/or momentum relative to Google, Microsoft, media companies and service providers that it can thrive with this approach.

The Mainstreaming of Cloud Services

The announcement of iCloud was met with both enthusiasm and incredulity.

Apple has been firing on all cylinders for years with hardware and software, but has consistently stumbled with services, whether it be the expensive and lackluster MobileMe (the launch of which even Jobs had to admit at the keynote was “not our finest hour”), or the weak reception to its music “social networking” service Ping. (This isn’t a new phenomenon - anyone remember eWorld?) The only service area where Apple has really sung is with its retail stores.

With iCloud, Apple is cinching up the ecosystem it has painstakingly built up, cinching it so tight that it will become increasingly difficult for others - even ones as big as Google - to crack open.

MobileMe was an expensive, under-performing sideshow, but iCloud aims to reach deep into all the other Apple devices and make them all work together better. What was announced on Monday is surely only a hint of what lies ahead in the next 18 months for iCloud, iOS, and OS X all finally getting in sync.

Ironically, iCloud aims to improve on what was arguably the worst part of MobileMe - iDisk, a basic cloud storage feature. Given Jobs’ obvious frustrations with MobileMe, I can’t believe he would let yet another half-baked attempt out the door, especially not one that is now a major strategic piece of the puzzle. Based on the massive data center Apple has invested in, they’re not joking around.

Since the iPad launched, its lack of a file system has meant it’s not a true laptop replacement. One of the brilliant ideas about Dropbox is that it essentially puts the file system in the cloud and moves it off the device entirely. iCloud apparently opens the door for the same thing, and with even superior integration. Today with near ubiquitous broadband and 4G/LTE networks starting to roll out that offer home broadband speeds while mobile, this suddenly becomes a workable solution. (Bandwidth caps, tiered pricing, disappearance of all-you-can-eat data plans? Yes, there are flies in the ointment, but the longterm trend is clear.)

Linking Cloud, Apps, Devices, and OS’s

Consider two things that were discussed separately in the keynote: journaling in the next rev of the OS, Lion (which means no more saving - a file is continuously saved as it’s worked on), and continuous cloud syncing. Voila - you have your most up-to-the-second work constantly saved to the cloud, and made available on every other device.

My feeling is that iCloud will prove to be similar to IBM launching its PC in 1983. Prior to that point, the PC market was highly fragmented and dominated by niche players, and had little mainstream appeal. The arrival of IBM on the scene gave PCs a stamp of credibility and stability, and they gained sharply more acceptance. IBM made PC’s “easy” to get into, made them relevant, and created the archetype which others would mimic for decades.

Apple pulled off the same feat with mp3 players and smartphones, for largely the same reasons. So it will be with iCloud. Cloud services are not new (neither were mp3 players or smartphones), and the fact is that much of our critical data already lives in the cloud, via various web apps, service subscriptions, and email. But until now the various services have been poorly integrated, and offered by startups that many people don’t feel comfortable handing their data over to, whether for security or long-term availability/stability reasons.

They haven’t been ready for the mainstream, and iCloud will come to be seen as the turning point which changes that. For consumers who don’t yet get the relevance of cloud, the media syncing across devices provides the carrot to get into the concept.

MG Siegler looks at the different approaches to the cloud being taken by Apple, Google and Amazon, and notes that “Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works.” Exactly. This is what Apple does best - take complicated things that most people don’t care about, and makes them easy and understandable for a mainstream audience.