Why iCloud won't beat Dropbox and the failure of Airdrop

Re:Why iCloud won't beat Dropbox and the failure of Airdrop by aufreak3 on Sunday January 15, 2012 @04:11PM (#3468262)

If you string together the cases of Appletalk, iChat, ping, FaceTime, and now iCloud (photo stream in particular), the Apple model of 'communication' seems always limited to the apple ecosystem. Apple doesn't seem to understand that even if I have a full-Apple setup, people I want to communicate with may not. As long as they don't see this as a fundamental issue, folks like Dropbox need not worry. Once they do see it, though, and they decide to bring their design sense to it all ..... hmmm I must be dreaming.

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Re:Why iCloud won't beat Dropbox and the failure of Airdrop by SoftwareMaven on Sunday January 15, 2012 @06:16PM (#3468574)

The customers Apple is targeting with these services don't care. Apple is very good at defining their customer and they are amazingly dedicated to keeping feature creep from spoiling the experience for those users.

It isn't that Apple doesn't understand. They completely understand and make choices to do A better rather than A+B so-so. I wish more companies would follow suit rather. It's strong product design (the overlap between product management and design in its true sense).

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Re:Why iCloud won't beat Dropbox and the failure of Airdrop by aufreak3 on Sunday January 15, 2012 @10:54PM (#3469283)

The point I was trying to make is not that Apple is bad at designing these things. My point is that they seem to consistently miss the fact that communication is a platform agnostic need. To give an exaggerated example, would you buy an iPhone if it only let you make phone calls to other iPhones, despite it's super super design? Would you buy a Mac that only let you send emails to other macs?

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Re:Why iCloud won't beat Dropbox and the failure of Airdrop by SoftwareMaven on Sunday January 15, 2012 @11:06PM (#3469322)

That's a really good point. However, it is easier to create the protocol in a homogenous environment than to backfill a heterogeneous one. Case in point: FaceTime. I wouldn't buy an iPhone if it could only talk to iPhones, because the precedent has been set before. I don't have a problem with FaceTime being Apple-only, because 1) there is no precedent and 2) Apple can potentially make FaceTime better by limiting the platforms they worry about.

There may come a time where a competitor has all the features of FaceTime (especially its ease of use) and have platform agnosticism. Then the decision might change.

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Re:Why iCloud won't beat Dropbox and the failure of Airdrop by aufreak3 on Sunday January 15, 2012 @11:30PM (#3469377)

If you go by "skate to where the puck is going to be", the puck, when it comes to communication, always moves towards platform agnostic protocols. (.. and Skype provided a decent fraction of Facetime's functionality well before Facetime).

If the likelihood of a person using platform A is P(A), then the likelihood of two of them communicating is of the order of P(A)^2. So even if you have 20% platform penetration, that only gives you a communication likelihood of 4%, leaving plenty of space for other providers to fill.

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Re:Why iCloud won't beat Dropbox and the failure of Airdrop by alextgordon on Sunday January 15, 2012 @07:08PM (#3468744)

I don't believe these people actually exist. Unless you live at 1 Infinite Loop, most of the people you meet will have Windows computers.

Airdrop is only useful IF:

1. You want to send a file to someone

2. They are standing right next to you

3. They have a fairly recent Mac, running Lion.

Whereas Dropbox is useful whatever OS they're running, and wherever in the world they are.

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Re:Why iCloud won't beat Dropbox and the failure of Airdrop by jiggy2011 on Sunday January 15, 2012 @07:17PM (#3468764)

This reminds me of how you originally needed a Mac in order to use an iPod which was later reversed.

Perhaps they are attempting to create a lock-in via network effects similar to Microsoft's where everybody feels they should own at least 1 apple device just to be able to be compatible with everyone else.

It's also possible they will port this to other platforms once they have it right on the mac as there are many people (such as myself) who simply can't justify the cost of buying an apple device.

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