At first glance, the iCloud announcements today seemed to provide an Apple-sanctioned answer to everything that Dropbox has always provided. Cloud storage, ability to sync app data (but at the system level, just like Twitter!) and well over 2 free GB of storage.
One thing stuck out to me though, and it had to do with Steve’s comments about how hard they’ve been working to obscure the filesystem. I don’t think Apple is ever going to provide a way for users to browse their iCloud files and folders, either with Finder or any other app. Apple is slowly moving us away from having to even consider the file system. iTunes is your front end for music. iPhoto your front end for photos. Their vision is to have native apps that specialize in handling the file system for their own file types.
I wonder if my kids are ever going to use the term “file”. They’re already growing up with computers they assume they can touch — iPhones, iPads, Kinect to name a few. Even Apple TV, with the Remote app, becomes a touch-screen at a distance. All of these interfaces are more familiar to my kids than any Mac. Or, “desktop” I should say.
Ultimately I don’t think filesystems are ever going away at the developer level. I predict that the Mac will live on for decades in the form of the machine you use to make apps for other machines. Who knows. But at the very least, the “power users” will always use the file system.
So, I think Dropbox is going to live on. It’s a “power user” thing and a great (and free) secondary cloud. iCloud is going to be transparent to users. Dropbox will fit in right next to it.
Now I only wonder what will happen to Things.
Dropbox for the Rest of Us
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:
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”.