After reviewing the features of Apple's iCloud service it strikes me that Apple and Google have very different ideas about what a cloud is and what you can do with it. Apple basically likes to use the cloud for storage and a small amount of file management (remind me to come back to file management and how Apple and Google both make it irrelevant) to make sure some items (looks like music and other items may require some manual downloading) are synced across all of your Apple devices. Google actually sees the cloud as a platform.
One thing I see as missing from Apple's approach to cloud computing is the lack of any web-based applications with iCloud. In fact I think Apple's greatest fear is the web-based application because it is usually hardware agnostic. Apple has historically made consessions to the PC world when it benifited them (iTunes on PC, photos coming down from the iCloud to a PC). I believe Apple is still trying to use the iCloud to sell you an iMac/iPhone/iPad/iPod, etc. That is what happens when you are a hardware company and you've invested into over 300 retail locations, you sell hardware that many people buy religiously and you sell a lot of that hardware (200 million iOS devices, 54 million Mac users). Apple may say they are all about soul (software), but their soul only works on their brain (hardware), Apple's software and hardware are one in the same.
Google on the other hand sells a service (neither brain or soul, more like a mutant offspring of both). Just like Apple has now realized that all Macs are devices just like iPads, Google is still one step ahead because to them all devices are the same, Apple, Android, Mac or Windows PC (I would venture to say that Google's iOS applications would be identical in look and feature if Apple would let them). This is why you don't see native applications running on Chrome OS. Many have said this for years, the web is the most portable and cross-device platfrom available. If I were a mobile app developer I wouldn't be wasting my time developing for Android or iOS, I'd be developing for the WEB! Once you make sure it runs the same on iOS, Android, Chrome and Firefox it will run on nearly everything out there.
While Apple talked about some cool things today, it would be nice to see what those cool things looked like if they weren't behind the scenes being tied to increaseing sales of Apple hardware. Until Apple actually drinks their own medicine and realize what a "Post-PC" world also means a "Post-Mac" world and a "Post-device" world, I'll stick to my real cloud computing platform, Google.
