Apple’s iCloud — the end of visual web applications?

I guess there was too much to unpack from the WWDC 2011 Keynote for bloggers media journalists people to pick up on what I think becomes a fundamental shift in internet computing, if Apple’s vision becomes reality.

Steve Jobs announced iCloud starting with: “Some people think the cloud is just a big disk in the sky… We think it’s way more than that.”

That’s marketing spin of course. Because what Apple offers with iCloud is still just a big disk: albeit an upgraded one, being a big key-value and document store with some services around it.

It is not what everyone else usually understands the cloud to be: a place where all data resides and where all or most of the computing power takes place. No hardware, no software, right? I.e. Oracle’s netbook vision from the 1990’s, SalesForce noughties vision, and Google Chrome vision of today, where the devices are dirt cheap and dumb and only know how to “browse”. Application logic is downloaded to the browser everytime you visit the home of the web app.

Here’s the thing: if Apple gets its way there will be no more web applications with a visual front-end in a few years time.

Wordpress? That’ll be an iOS app. Not a bunch of PHP scripts you need to install with a mysql database and a webserver on some host: hours of pain, no more please. It also won’t be wordpress.com, blogger.com or tumblr.com for the rest of us who couldn’t care less about installing and maintaining wordpress software, where instead you sign up via a browser and then you can start blogging; still too painful (forgot password? creditcard? username? come on…). It’ll be an app you install from the store with a touch. You start your first blog post on your PC, save a draft (actually it’s auto-saved for you now if you use OSX Lion), then on the way to work you finish it on your iPad at your fav coffee shop, and publish.

Twitter would have no visual web interface if Apple ran the shop. If Twitter didn’t exist yesterday, and they would start building it today, would they start by creating a visual front-end web application? No. They would create iOS/android apps. While Apple now has Twitter integrated, for the moment, they also attack Twitter with iMessage. Twitter, to Apple, is just a big disk in the sky with 140-character messages on it.

Apple killed their own mobile-me service. It was “not their finest hour”. And thereby once again they have zero apps in the cloud. They make it sound like they have apps in the cloud, with Mail, Calendar, iTunes, AppStore, etc, but they don’t. The apps are on the devices. Only data is in the cloud.

This is in sharp contrast to all other big players. See for example Microsoft: they have a ton of apps in the cloud, some losing heaps of money but that’s besides the point: According to Apple mobile-me was a disaster (I’m paraphrasing here). What they learnt? They will never-ever again create a web application. Nor will they therefor promote it or offer tools to developers to make that easy.

Why?

Because the browser doesn’t optimize for any device.

Only the OS itself can offer optimized user experiences. What do you need a browser for? To twitter? Nobody really wants that. You want it (twitter, facebook, yammer, etc.) with you, “on” at all times (i.e. something like Twitterrific). The only decent video experience is via an iphone/ipad/apple-tv youtube-enabled app, not via the youtube website. The only pleasurable way to buy books, music, apps, you name it, is all via iOS apps, not via Amazon. And so on…

If I were a VC, I would start spending my money on startups that build iOS/android apps. That investment in color.com does make a bit of sense (though still way too overvalued to start with imo). I’d invest in a company that’s going to replace Wordpress / Blogger / Tumblr, because those have proved there’s an enormous market out there, but we all know how very painful they are to use too. If that were simply an iOS app that would sync your posts to whatever device you’re using and you can post from wherever whenever, I think heaps would switch.

I’m not saying next year Apple won’t offer computing power via iCloud as well, much like Amazon’s EC2 service. They might. Though I doubt it. If Apple does, then its function is not to serve web applications consumed by browsers, but to process data that’s in the iCloud consumed by devices. That’s a completely different computing paradigm compared to how AWS, Rackspace, Heroku, Force.com, etc. want you to think about it.

Closing thought: if every bit of data disappears in iCloud, how does one find anything? I assume by default iCloud won’t advertise anything, so Google won’t be able to index. I believe Apple is setting itself up to become the next Search giant as well. We have Steve on record though for saying at this years WWDC: “No ads. We just don’t want them.” We’ll see.