Now that iCloud is in full swing, lots of interesting buzz is circulating about its similarity to Dropbox. Here’s a good observation by 512pixels, via Gruber at Daring Fireball.
After its announcement, it occurred to me that iCloud is how Apple would do a service like Dropbox today. If this were 10 years ago, an Apple cloud service might look more like Dropbox itself. The difference being: obscuring, or not-obscuring, the filesystem.
Apple (especially under Steve) has always been about curating the computing experience for the masses. Looking back, it’s amazing how “geeky” the Mac OS used to be; over the years they’ve chipped away at obscuring the geekiness of computing so that at the surface it looks and works like a car dashboard. No one needs to see the engine to drive the car (an analogy my friend Mark used to talk about). The engine is still there, obviously. Brave tinkers and fully qualified engineers can pop the hood to do what they need to do in there. As Gruber pointed out today:
Perhaps not a bad definition of a post-PC device: one with no user-visible file system. Dropbox is very much a PC technology, conceptually, because it is all about the file system. That’s why we nerds love Dropbox on our post-PC devices — it gives us some PC-like control. Sometimes we want files.
Dropbox is a holdover to the old days — one that will continue to be extremely useful for “under-the-hood” guys — whereas iCloud is “Dropbox for the rest of us”.
Star Wars: Episode X
It’s been a great week of reinvigorating imaginations about a galaxy far far away. Episode VII is soon on its way, after what seems like a foregone conclusion that it would never come.
Something I’ve been thinking about recently, though, is what it’s going to be like to open up a brand new storyline (assuming we leave behind all of those outlines from the dozens of paperback works of fiction that filled up my shelves in the years between Jedi and Menace). The six-story arc is nice and neat. Everything after Vader, after the dark times… after the Empire… it’s all uncharted territory.
What made Star Wars so great to begin with (the year after I was born; I don’t remember it, but the effects of it lingered way past when I was five and watched A New Hope for the first time with my brother on a VHS cassette) was the sensation of dropping into the middle of a fully developed universe and myth. You didn’t know who the black-and-white-armored suits were bursting through the corridor in a blaster-induced haze were, but you knew they meant trouble. You learned about the Jedi as shadows of the past, right along Luke Skywalker. It was the middle — not the beginning. It painted a picture from the inside out and left us eager to fill in the space before it.
What if Disney didn’t produce Episode VII, but instead, Episode X? Produce a new trilogy starting not at the end of Jedi, but some 30 years later, with Luke Skywalker playing the mysterious, senile old legend? Skip the beginning of the next saga and get right to the good middle stuff, just like we did in the beginning?