I don’t follow Apple very closely most of the time, but these facts I learned in close proximity recently struck me as pointing to an interesting possibility:
- Apple has a giant datacenter with no clear publicly released purpose. It’s one big server farm and it’s online now.
- Apple has a cloud OS patent. It’s most focused on the administration of such an OS with cloud-based, network-booted capabilities. The hardware platform isn’t specified, but they applied for this back in 2006, before the iPhone was released and well before iPad rumors took flight.
- Apple is quietly and quickly moving into the enterprise space. Not through the server route, or even necessarily through MacBooks and iMacs, but through revolutionary alternative devices such as the iPad.
Perhaps Apple plans to release their own cloud-provided OS, enterprise-branded and customized. Securely connected to their sprawling new datacenter, Apple could provide businesses of all sizes with a productivity-enhancing and compliance-increasing platform that corporate users, IT teams, and management might all manage to get behind. There might be team-specific apps that are developed in-house or generated from a series of general template applications that provide commonly-needed functionality. From knowledge workers’ daily activity to retail scenarios various organizations could stand to benefit from devices, interface patterns and quality that users prefer enough to bring in personally.
Comments welcome!
I do not have an idea of what Apple is trying to achieve with a ‘Cloud’ platform; perhaps it can be a closed competition to Google’s Chrome OS, available on their Air/iPad platforms. Air and Cloud, heh. That would totally sell.
A section of the improved data center could however, also be for their new iAds platform for mobile (and perhaps more) advertising.
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I think that it will be for a new way of media distribution and consumption. Amazon has already released their cloud music product, and apple and google are rumored to be next. Also, a year ago, they bought the awesome lala.com service, which was THE best clud music platform I have ever seen. Lala offered listen-once cloud access to all albums and songs, so that you could figure out what stuff you liked for free, then when you know what you wanted to buy, you paid 10 cents a song for cloud streaming access. Optionally you could pay 90 cents a song for download access. I think that I bought ten times as much music this way, where as now I buy none. You had to have net access, but lets admit it, the future will bring ubiquitous network access to all corners of the earth. I think that Apple is developing a cloud music and movie and media cloud farm for the masses.