What the iCloud will cause to happen next

Now that Apple has introduced iCloud, what happens next? Two counter-moves are inevitable.

One will come from Google, and is likely to be rapid. Building automatic syncing into the Android platform is now essential, and must happen soon. Apart from anything else, it is one way to use the company’s astounding smartphone success to stimulate flagging sales of Android tablets. You can be sure that Microsoft would dearly like to respond in the same way, and this has to be a core feature of Windows 8. That, though, is still some months away. It is now vital that Microsoft gets this into the early test version of the software that it is likely to put into developers’ hands at its September PDC conference.

The second counter-move will come from other device makers looking for ways to defend themselves against Apple. They need to build more of the same back-up and syncing features into their own families of devices – and they need to exploit their relative openness as a way to counter Apple’s powerful, but closed, device universe. One way to do that is to align themselves with cross-platform services that have already gained a critical mass of users, like Dropbox, whose service is used to spread content between devices. What they lose in “stickiness” (there will be less reason to buy more devices from the same company) they will gain in usefulness.

But to really rival Apple, other device makers will have to match the extreme simplicity of the iCloud. That is the real innovation that Apple came up with this week: there is no need to mess with moving files between folders or “sharing” data, it just works.