Użyteczna ewolucja

I’ve just read Charles Stross story about Flash/Apple debacle. The most interesting idea is that PC industry is dying, HP and MS are deeply worried and even Apple – the most innovative hardware company is afraid of the future, when hardware profits will be minuscule and everything will be stored in a cloud. As I agree with general notion of drive to the cloud, I should mention to Charles, that Apple is not a cloud company. It is not even in any way software company. Apple has little expertise and, what is more important, will to be a cloud internet company. If you look carefully at Apple software offerings, these are interfaces. Yes, we are approaching fast times, that there is no hardware without basic level of software, which operates the hardware and works as a interface between human operator and hardware. But it is not “real software”. Look at some metaphor with cars. I like cars. These are now extremely boring machines from the operator point of view. All mechanical functions are automated and general interface (steering wheel, switches and knobs, pedal and gear shaft) are fairly standard and mature. So these mechanical, electrical and electronic “operator handles” are now intrinsic part of driving experience and taken for granted. But the “real software” of car is weekend. I mean weekend as social behavior, purpose for using the car for country trip. Also, everyday commute to work or emergency trip to hospital. If you take this to computers – iPhone/iPad Apple interface is only a fancy steering wheel. And Apple is still hardware company. Very good, innovative, fancy, premium etc. etc. But hardware company, which has no record of innovation in real software. All real software activity is somewhere else – it’s tweeting, blogging, fourscquring, youtubing or gathering personal band of friendly primates on Facebook. All these activities need some real software and infrastructure. Their also need hooks and interfaces. These interfaces are generally hardware agnostic. At least developing needed specific hooks to some hardware are cheap and easy. Be it web app or iPad app.
But in this word of “real software” there is no Apple. And if we look carefully in some their tries – these are poorly executed, boring or plain stupid.
Take general synchronization of MobileMe. It is some kind of Outlook functionality clone from 90-ties. Pity. iPad iWorks with no usable cloud file synchronization. Pity. Sandboxed apps with no OS support for aggregating similar data in some kind of hubs – e.g. iPod on iPhone cannot play music files from my cloud bank or even music generated or acquired by app on the same machine. I used e.g. cute app VoiceBand to make my own garage recording. To hear it in iPod interface I had to mail it to my PC and synchronize it with iTunes. It is not crazy, it is plain stupid. I can go on and on. Just do not say that Apple is the software or content company. They have no chance here. No experience. And no future.
I think there is place for Apple as a hardware company. There are many innovative areas for hardware. Apple can live handsomely on next wave of iPads, which will become next PCs, for 3-4 years. Then they can introduce wearable computers with eye projectors. I am sure, they’ll make it very well. But cloud – here I am very skeptical. One can say – what about iTunes and AppStore. And they bought and closed Lala.com. Well, these are successful enterprises, but bring not so much to Apple’s coffers. Something like 8% and there is no big room for growth. I just don’t believe in traditional model of selling media content.