It’s war! Apple, Microsoft and Google battle it out to gain a bigger share of the cloud services marketplace.
February 3, 2012
The adoption levels of cloud computing are on the rise, driven not only by advancing technology and convenience, but also by the recent downturn in the economic environment. Saving money has been a focus of companies in recent years, and what better way to achieve this goal than to employ cost-efficient cloud computing services.
Catching the worm
Customers won in the early stages of the skirmish will remain with their vendor of choice for some time.
The cloud, with its streaming media services and promise of near limitless storage and other cost-saving functions, has become an arena of extreme interest to both the public and private sectors…
It’s also become a battleground for heavyweights such as Apple, Microsoft and Google in their fight to attract more users and gain a bigger slice of the cloud services marketplace pie.
In the past, users were encouraged to buy new software, which generated revenue for its vendors through a one-time purchase. Today, the cloud comes with the prospect of annual subscription fees linked to selected services, effectively securing a revenue stream for a potentially lengthy period. It’s a concept with considerable appeal.
Google and Microsoft, which pioneered cloud services, were joined in 2011 in battle by Apple, with its iCloud offering.
All three organisations’ agendas are simple: each is in a fight to have users sync and store to their particular cloud service, because it is most likely that customers won in the early stages of the skirmish will remain with their vendor of choice for some time, as moving files from one platform to another is a complex, time-consuming task.
Google, Microsoft and Apple have developed similar approaches and mobile strategies to achieve their goals. All are currently offering – or developing – ways in which their emerging cloud services portfolios can be integrated with their mobile operating systems.
Google, for example, is making sure that most of its mobile Android devices are equipped with a range of shortcuts to its various cloud services – including Gmail – with Chrome OS and Chromebooks.
In fact, of the three protagonists, Google has the most experience, having offered Web-based cloud services for a number of years. In addition to Gmail, these include the Google Docs suite, Google Picasa Photos, Google Maps and YouTube.
Google might have been a late starter in the cloud-based, online music streaming business, but its recent announcement of the Google Music Store should place it on a par with Apple’s iTunes and Amazon’s popular MP3 store and Cloud Player.
Google’s entry is a significant development for its more than 200 million Android (phone and tablet) users, who now have a comparable service to that enjoyed by Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod users.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is focusing its efforts on integrating Windows Phone 7 with Windows Live, giving users the opportunity to upload photos, music and documents from their phones directly to their Windows Live Skydrive accounts. Without a Windows Phone 7 device, uploading data to a mobile device is not possible.
Similarly, Apple is integrating iCloud with iOS 5 and OS X Lion, which will simplify the process of transferring files between an Apple Mac, iOS device and iCloud.
Against this backdrop, it seems a safe bet that the current war between cloud service providers will ultimately produce a winner in the ongoing mobile platform war.
This war is being waged in a marketplace that is rapidly turning its back on the PC in favour of the tablet and smartphone. Analysts are confidently predicting that more smartphones than PCs will be sold in 2012, with sales exceeding $120 billion.
In the smartphone arena, Google, Microsoft and Apple are joined by global organisations such as Nokia, Research In Motion and HP in a fight for supremacy. The gloves are off.
With Nokia opting to ditch its own platform for Microsoft’s, the odds seem stacked in the software vendor’s favour. But Google and (particularly) Apple will be hard to beat.
While Google’s Android ‘ecosystem’ – running on a myriad devices – has gained in popularity in 2011, it was trumped by Apple’s iPhone and iPad sales in the fourth quarter of 2011, which were 37 million and 15 million respectively.
Apple, now the most valuable company in the world with a market value of $419 billion, has a history of developing reliable and easy-to-use products underpinned by ecosystems that customers tend to support single-mindedly.
Apple’s unprecedented success is based on its ability to produce offerings that function more effectively and are more appealingly to the user. This is Steve Jobs legacy. Will it help Apple win the war in the cloud? It has a reported $97.6 billion ‘war chest’ to do just this.