Amazon and Google have rolled out cloud music services, says Dan Lyons at The Daily Beast, but, naturally, now that Apple's announced plans to introduce a competing service next week, "there's been plenty of speculation about how Apple might leapfrog the competition." Nobody knows much about iCloud yet, but Apple clearly has an opportunity to do something big. Right now, people are putting photos on Flickr, Picasa, and MobileMe. They're creating documents on Google Docs, storing backup files at Dropbox, posting videos on Youtube, and streaming music over Pandora. But "what everybody wants... is one place to keep everything." So there's an opening for someone to create a central warehouse in cyberspace "where people can keep all of their stuff — music, movies, home videos, photos, files." And if anyone can pull that off, it's the famously user-friendly Apple. Here, an excerpt:
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that Apple will be the first company to deliver a cloud service that is easy to understand and easy to use.
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