The Steve Jobs email that outlined Apple’s strategy a year before his death

Re:The Steve Jobs email that outlined Apple’s strategy a yea... by walterbell on Thursday November 03, 2016 @05:36PM (#12868199)

  – we invented Digital Hub concept
  – PC as hub for all your digital assets
  – contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, music, videos
  – digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud

This was 5 years ago. Since then, iPad sales have declined and iPhone sales are flat. iCloud did _not_ become the consumer's single hub for all devices. Amazon Echo created a new device category and Siri did not take over the world. IoT is fragmented chaos. One can imagine that Jobs would have adjusted his 2011 strategy in response to the changing market.

If Jobs faced a choice of promoting "Apple PC as digital hub" or "non-Apple cloud(s) as aggregate digital hub", which would be better? Apple has thrived by integrating hardware and software. In the "cloud", this integration advantage is lost as Microsoft aggressively ports their apps to Azure cloud + iOS devices. Jobs could have read the writing on the cloud and repositioned the Mac as IoT digital hub and cloud cache, via macOS Sierra Server ($20 in the Mac App Store, but could use some love, http://www.apple.com/macos/server/).

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Re:The Steve Jobs email that outlined Apple’s strategy a yea... by initram on Thursday November 03, 2016 @06:33PM (#12868655)

> iCloud did _not_ become the consumer's single hub for all devices

Are you sure? I now keep only a small portion of the music I own on my phone. The rest is in my iCloud account. I don't keep any video on my devices (other than what I record with the camera). It's all on iCloud. I use my AppleTV to watch movies, television shows, and listen to music, and it all streams from the cloud. While I don't keep my photos in the cloud because I value security, most iOS users do.

iCloud has its issues, but people using iOS are using it for most of their digital media.

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