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TwitterApple’s cloud strategy forces Wintel dilemma
Posted by Marc Brien, VP Research, Domicity Ltd.
This post is based on research for an upcoming Domicity CORProfile© report analyzing the strategies and operations of a global cloud leader.
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One useful insight from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is the central role for iCloud in Apple’s overall consumer market strategy. Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and other Wintel leaders need to respond if they are to stem the market and mind share that continues to drift Apple’s way.
Beginning in 2001, Apple began to position its Mac PC as the digital hub for a growing array of consumer peripheral devices that now includes iPod, iPhone, and iPad. A user’s Mac would hold most content along with key applications for manipulating and accessing this content such as iWork, iTunes, GarageBand, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and so on.
iCloud is designed to fundamentally alter this paradigm. It becomes the digital hub while the Mac is demoted to join the other internet/cloud access devices. Apple customers are encouraged to use iCloud to sync and/or store all their content on the promise that they can gain access to this content anytime, from anywhere … with the relevant Apple device.
Content can be expected to ultimately migrate away from user devices and into iCloud where it can then be enhanced through streaming, by augmenting it in context-aware fashion with additional content, or other stratagems yet to be devised or revealed.
The customer lock-in that Apple achieved with its Mac-based digital hub strategy was impressive. However, as a blueprint for proprietary lock-in, iCloud has the potential to make the original IBM 360 mainframe look like a Linux box. Once a consumer puts digital content into the iCloud it is unlikely to ever leave. And of course, users will be compelled to buy Apple client devices for access to their iCloud-based content.
Wintel vendors still have nothing comparable to iCloud for the consumer market. They need to move fast before their customer base loads substantial content into Apple’s cloud. Many Wintel customers now carry iPods and iPhones and are beginning to add iPads to their e.toolbox. The barriers to making the move from Windows to Mac O/S are steadily eroding.
If Apple’s initiatives are not of sufficient concern to Microsoft, Google is also sprinting down the cloud-based digital hub path and could replace Microsoft as the lead developer of client device software technology for HP and other leading Wintel suppliers. Instead of producing consumer products that run Microsoft software, these device suppliers could produce platforms that enable users to access and manipulate their content in the Google cloud, using Android, Chrome and other Google software.
This scenario should hold little comfort for Wintel players, particularly HP which planned to use its proprietary webOS to inject some Apple-like profit margins into its client devices business by building a parallel universe to Apple. Throwing herself onto the mercies of Google for a consumer cloud solution will not help CEO Meg Whitman wring better margins from HP’s resurrected PC business.
In order to stem future defections to Google and Apple, it may be in Microsoft’s self interest to cooperate with its leading Wintel partners HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony and others, to develop a common Windows-based consumer cloud. As part of this process it would then be up to Microsoft’s partners to negotiate a bigger share of Windows profits.
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