Musings on iCloud

Rumour has it Apple has purchased iCloud.com for a bazillion dollars.

They’re rumoured to be working with music labels to provide a cloud streaming service for music. There’s that massive data centre they’re building - and further rumours about a twin, to be built right across the street. There have been rumours about a cloud-based iOS device. There hasn’t really been much said about iOS 5, which ought to be ramping up the hype machine soon.

I think Apple’s up to more than just a music streaming service. I think they’re working on an *everything*-streaming service. They’re already streaming movies to the AppleTV - that’s cloud-based movies. Already got that. Check. Next is music. Technically, that’s easy. Getting the music labels behind the idea, and dealing with legacy collections that already exist on users’ devices is a bit more difficult, but still not insurmountable. And all the rumours have been pointing in this direction anyway.

The twist that I’m thinking of is apps. Streaming, cloud-based apps. This could be something halfway between Citrix and Flash. Write an app to iOS APIs, it’ll either download in realtime to your device and execute there (like Flash), or execute on the cloud and send the display to your device (like Citrix). The device could be a relatively dumb mobile handheld device without much grunt, in which case all the processing will be in the cloud - or a relatively powerful traditional computer, in which case the processing will happen locally in some kind of sandbox or plugin. Or perhaps some way to blend the two.

In typical Apple fashion, they change the paradigm so that the previous arguments (Flash, syncing) are not only won, but made totally invalid. The assumptions the argument is based on become false. Apple creates a new set of assumptions and wins the redefined argument. Just some thoughts. I have no inside information, and I’ve been known to be wrong before. I’m very interested though. I smell big change in the air.