It’s the data, stupid!
I get excited when I saw a nice long post in my google reader on daring fireball and quickly added it to Instapaper to read later. I thought finally someone is going to articulate all the ideas I’ve had about apples latest and greatest offering in a way I was just not capable of. Sadly like so many before him, gruber falls just a tiny but short on this one.
I don’t care if it’s coded to run in web browser or in a so called “native app”. Focusing in to much on that misses the more important difference, the difference about where data is stored.
The way I see it this:
Google’s approach to data is, there’s just one copy and it’s stored up in the “cloud”. When you run a program like google docs your reading and writing directly to the cloud.
Apples iCloud on the other hand has many copies of the file, one for every device. The core of their offering is a clever set of Apis that makes sure all these local copies stay in sync with each other.
The main reason for the two approaches in my mind comes down to just one word…Flash! No, no not the web plugin Apple loves to hate, what I’m talking about of course is flash storage. Take a look at the differences in hardware from apple and google. At first the obvious differences between a chromebook and an iPad revolve around touch, apples got it googles doesn’t. But what I think is more telling is the storage space, iPads have at least 32 gigs, and chromebooks have almost nothing!
Apples bet its future on the importance of big and fast flash storage built into its machines. If iCloud allowed you to work with copies of files directly on the server there would be no need for all those gigs.
Forget about touch screen this, web based that… If you want to know the real difference between Apple’s approach and Google’s, it’s the data, stupid!
