Apple’s digital hub strategy worked for the better part of a decade but broke down because devices changed. Instead of having an iPod dedicated to music, and a camera dedicated to photos, today’s devices are multifunctional. We want our phones to have the same music, photos, videos, and documents as our tablets and our Macs. We want all of our devices to share their content wirelessly. Maintaining the same content on modern multifunction devices with a wired connection to a single PC is counter productive when each device can access the information independently from the cloud. Replacing the centralized PC with the cloud removes the need for wires and individual device availability. Suddenly the PC is just another device, and the cloud is the always on, always available, keeper of our content. No longer will we have to sync multiple devices in turn or worry about which content made it to which device. With the cloud as the central hub all of our content is available to every device as soon as that it connects to the internet.

During the past couple of years companies have approached cloud computing differently. Google was one of the first, and while mail, contacts, and calendars may be downloaded locally to our devices, the Google approach is to keep all of our information in the cloud only allowing us to access it through the web browser. No where is this strategy more evident than on a Google Chromebook where a low priced laptop is equipped with a web browser and not much else. No where is this strategy more flawed than in the constant gap between the capabilities of web and local applications.

Other companies like Apple and Dropbox understand the importance of making data available to local applications where the capabilities are strongest and the experience more mature. Dropbox showed the world that keeping a folder in sync automatically between multiple computers was possible. While Apple was still taking missteps with iDisk and iSync, Dropbox was mirroring real data across multiple computers in the filesystem. Dropbox’s approach isn’t perfect, it doesn’t actually sync the contents of two files, but it does reliably mirror the contents of multiple folders across all of our PCs. Until this year’s WWDC keynote us geeks were still really excited about Dropbox and why shouldn’t we be? As computer enthusiasts we each understand how our data goes into the filesystem and how to get it out. With Dropbox and symbolic links we can sync more than the contents of a folder. We can sync our entire home directories, and the preferences of individual applications. With Dropbox and the filesystem, geeks have the tools they need to build an immersive cloud computing experience, but with iCloud we don’t have to.

Apple’s iCloud does cloud computing without looking back at the filesystem or being trapped in the browser. iCloud keeps our data in sync without us navigating the filesystem or building a network of symbolic links between our applications and the cloud. When it debutes iCloud will sync our mail, contacts, and calendars for free. It will allow multiple devices to manipulate this data simultaneously, syncing the changes in real time. It will provide a legal way for us to keep our applications and music in sync across all of our devices, and it will perform scheduled backups of our iOS devices. But the Apple applications that take advantage of iCloud are just the beginning. iWork document syncing and an autonomous photostream are just examples of what iCloud will do as soon as developers add it to all of their applications. iCloud’s real potential is in its public API, its availability on multiple platforms, and the multi billion dollar infrastructure Apple has put into it. iCloud is not just offsite backup, or file syncing. iCloud is the replacement for the way we access and store our files. With iCloud individual applications manage the presentation of their data, and the data is available everywhere the applications are. I can’t imagine a better replacement for the filesystem than having my data everywhere I go with iCloud.