The Times They Are a-Changin' ⚓

Apple PR:

Eddy Cue will take on the additional responsibility of Siri® and Maps, placing all of our online services in one group. This organization has overseen major successes such as the iTunes Store®, the App Store℠, the iBookstore℠ and iCloud®. This group has an excellent track record of building and strengthening Apple’s online services to meet and exceed the high expectations of our customers.

While the most discussed topic seems to be that Forstall is out, and Ive seems to be in, and wether this was about maps or not, I would argue that this part is the bigger issue: Networking and iCloud.

So far the track record is not good. iMessage, while not having totally broken down, took quite some time to work the way it was initially intended, and even now messages sometimes arrive out of order or not at all or not on all machines. Documents in the iCloud has some major conceptional design flaws, the biggest one being the non-existing of the slightest idea of sharing between people - while also suffering from implementation and execution difficulties. Ask anyone who used the non-file based iCloud variants in their Apps. And don't even get me started on Game Center and the networking behind it. All that LTE and fast WiFi is not enough to view a list of friends or high scores without a noticable delay. iTunes Match also took quite some time to work as advertised. Great idea, great concept, strange and diffuse execution. And even the App Store has had some major hiccups.

In a nutshell: I'm worried. Apple is putting networking and their iCloud services front and center in all their products. And while everything works more or less okay for the end user, there are flaws. Design flaws as well as technical flaws.

They could throw away .Mac, because it was an add on. They could also throw out mobile.me because it was essentially the same. They already can't kill iCloud anymore, it is here to stay. For better or worse.