Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
It’s amazing what hold Apple now has. ‘An announcement of an announcement’ makes the front page of Financial Times and about 600 other news reports within an hour.
As we reported a week ago – Another killer App from Apple – Apple has tonight announced that it is to announce the iCloud next Monday. On top of that Steve Jobs, in person, is to do the announcing. No further details were given but it is really rare for Apple to say even that much in advance.
As we conjectured last week, at the very least iCloud will be a music streaming service. We hope it will allow users to upload their entire music collections to the iCloud (including those not bought from iTunes) and play/stream them “Anytime, Anywhere and on Any device”. Holway’s martini Moment gets better and better. Thus un-tethering your iPod/iPad/iPhone from its docking PC. But, of course, the service could be used for anything else you wanted to store in the iCloud – from documents to photos.
Apple is more and more turning itself into a Services company. It did that with iTunes and the Apps Store. iCloud could become a significant new revenue stream for Apple. Of course, there is no reason why the iCloud should be just for consumers. As the ‘consumer-isation of IT’ (or is that the ‘Apple-isation of IT’?) continues apace, the dividing lines between the consumer and the enterprise become increasingly blurred.
As expected, the markets lapped it up – particularly the return of Mr Jobs. Apple shares up over 3% tonight.
Footnote - The iCloud logo used in this article is from the previous owners of the iCloud.com URL. Apple is reputed to have paid over $5m for it a few months back.
