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A comment on Why iCloud won't beat Dropbox and the failure of Airdrop. Parent comment

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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