Cloud Loyalty Battle: Google VS. Apple by laptop battery

November 21, 2011

batteryfast.co.uk

Cloud Loyalty Battle: Google VS. Apple Cloud Loyalty Battle: Google VS. Apple

The Cloud

CloudTags: Google , Apple , war , cloud , Toshiba pa3534u-1brs battery , Asus a32-f3 battery , Dell inspiron 1300 battery

The cloud is nothing new. The basic concepts of storing files in a remote location that can be accessed anywhere are as old as the internet. But the modern application of this technology, by companies like Apple and Google, is more aggressive than ever before. The biggest reason for this is the shift from stationary to mobile computing. Products like Dropbox have proliferated by riding the frothy wave of the move away from the towers and boxes that sat on our desks, to the ever more powerful and portable laptop.

Apple and Google have been working hard to become the conduit through which you access all of your data. This process has involved replacing the desktop machine with ‘the cloud’ as a repository for all of your information. In the process, these companies are waging a war for you. Not just for your patronage for their services, or as a customer for their devices. No, they want you to pledge your data loyalty to them exclusively.

Printed with

joliprint

They are looking to do this by helping you to embed your life so thoroughly into their respective systems that you become locked in, unwilling or unable to leave without a great expenditure of time, effort and money. This war stands to get more intense as data lockin becomes a real metric by which observers and the companies themselves measure success.

But a second, and overlapping, shift is underway. People are leaving their laptops behind for tablet computers and smartphones. These devices are insanely powerful when compared to even the laptops of a decade ago and feature a set of key benefits, as well as limitations. The most important catalyst for this change was the availability of an always-on data connection. The expansion and near-ubiquity of data networks is the platform that has allowed smartphones to become our constant and necessary companions. On the other side of the coin, we have the limitations of storage. Yes, these smartphones are robust compared to computers of a few years ago, but their storage capacities are nowhere near what is available on a desktop computer. This makes choosing what to bring and what to leave behind a massive headache, and something that many people will never bother to do.

http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/cloud-loyalty-battle-google-vs-apple/

Page 1

November 21, 2011

batteryfast.co.uk Cloud Loyalty Battle: Google VS. Apple

Enter the cloud. A small, portable and connected device, with limited onboard storage makes the ideal companion for a system that allows all data to be hosted and facilitated by a service that allows you access to it from wherever you are. The cloud has been shoved to the forefront of the struggle between Apple and Google because of the rise of smartphones and tablets. It would still exist without them, but now it has taken on a new meaning and has become the biggest battleground in this conflict.

Once users come to expect their music and application states to be seamlessly available across all of their devices, it will become unfathomable that any device won’t work this way. As this becomes a way of life when working with our devices, the concept of locking will become ever more valuable. Every new smartphone user is essentially making a choice with the purchase of their first device that will chart the path of their operating system brand loyalty over years to come. And the cloud integrated services are just in their infancy.

Google Music vs. iTunes Match This concept is why it’s so silly to compare Google’s recently launched Music service with Apple’s iTunes Match. These services aren’t competing with each other, they’re designed as a hook to get the user more deeply invested in the platform. And they stand a really good chance of doing so. Once you’ve got seamless access to your music from anywhere you want, without having to ever sync it, it’s fairly addictive. After using iCloud for nearly 5 months, including the beta period, I can tell you that I think much less about where items are synced and what devices I pick up to use for certain things.

Printed with

joliprint

This has become especially evident over the past weeks as developers have begun releasing updates to their apps that take advantage of Apple’s CoreData syncing, making preferences, game progress, documents and other items transfer seamlessly to all iOS devices. iTunes Match has only enhanced this cozy feeling of your data being taken care of for you. Sure, there are rough patches still, both in iTunes Match and iCloud at large, but by and large it just works.

Google vs. Apple will be decided in the cloud Apple’s heavy investment in iCloud is its statement that the battle for customers will be won or lost in the cloud. Google, although effectively popularizing many cloud services for the first time, is playing a bit of catchup here. It has yet to brand its cloud services under one name, although it is making attempts to do so with Google+. Pretty soon I feel we will see Google+ Docs, Google+ Music, Google+ Everything. The social layer is one more piece of lockin that Google is anxious to leverage, rather than succumbing to an external layer like Facebook. That isn’t to say that it is completely ‘advantage Apple’ at the moment though. Google excels at single sign-on services and the Google ID has proven to be an excellent way to insta-personalize Android devices. If you ditch an old Android phone and grab a new one, you can be up and running in minutes,

http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/cloud-loyalty-battle-google-vs-apple/

Page 2

November 21, 2011

batteryfast.co.uk Cloud Loyalty Battle: Google VS. Apple

provided that you are invested in Google’s cloud of course. Apple’s ‘PC-free’ improvements to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 5 are its answer to a seamless transition from one device to another, using the cloud. Beginning with iOS 5, it became possible to drop an iPhone in a river, walk into an Apple Store and be up and running with your essential information in minutes and a fully restored device within an hour. These conveniences are all due to the cloud, and are completely incompatible with the opposing system. Switching customers are effectively starting over from scratch unless they put forth the effort to collate, download and re-upload their data from their current cloud. This is something that we will see people less and less willing to do as the cloud experience gets better and more seamless. The increasing ‘stickyness’ will benefit whichever system got its hooks in first.

Different games Google knows that the only way that Android is going to survive is by a superiority of numbers. By doing that, it is playing a completely different game than Apple, which is after profitability first, rather than market share.

Printed with

joliprint

This is the fact that is overlooked by most of the people writing “Android is Winning” or “Apple is Winning” pieces.

to be a reasonable plan of attack, at least for now. It remains to be seen if the strategy of making $10 per Android user, per year, is viable, but it is being pursued with vigor. For Google, the eyes on its ads are the most important thing. Locking those eyes into its system is a matter of life and death on its chosen battlefield. This is where its goals overlap with Apple’s. Apple also wants users locked into its system, in order to leverage the halo effect to promote crosssales of iPhones, iPads and Macs. To this end, Apple is working hard to divorce itself from Google in order to cease contributing to its opposing platform. That divorce may be easier in some areas, like Siri, than it is in areas like the default search engine on iPhones and iPads. I’ve been using Bing for the last several weeks in an effort to explore the possibilities I laid out in this article. While I found Bing pleasant to look at and well organized, it’s clear that Google’s search is still far superior to Microsoft’s. It will take a lot of work before I feel that Apple would be able to swap those two. This is good for Google, because about 2/3 of search queries it serves in mobile are done via Apple hardware.

Conclusion

Apple is a hardware company that makes an insane amount of profit on its devices, which run its OS. Google is an OS company that has traded any amount of profit it might have made on Android for sheer market share of eyeballs.

The cloud is set as the battleground that will decide the fate of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS as the dominant force in OS. It’s the shared piece of land that the two companies fight over, as they wage their own disparate battles in the profitability and market share spaces.

Since Google makes its money almost entirely off of ads delivered through its services, this appears

As each offering is improved and made more essential to your portable computing life, we should

http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/cloud-loyalty-battle-google-vs-apple/

Page 3

November 21, 2011

batteryfast.co.uk Cloud Loyalty Battle: Google VS. Apple

see the way that we use our devices getting less and less fiddly. Who knows what the future of this war will bring? Perhaps a culture of ‘pick up and use’ smartphones. Rented or ‘disposable’ devices that act as dumb terminals to our cloud data. Regardless of the future impact, the lockin effects of the cloud are just beginning, and neither Apple or Google will give up your data without a fight.