Apple’s iCloud announcement finally showed the long awaited follow-up to Mobileme. While MobileMe was considered a failure on most accounts for Apple, iCloud looks to be a replacement worthy of the Apple branding.
But not to be outdone, Microsoft too has its own cloud service called SkyDrive. Microsoft states that since 2007, Skydrive has been the one place to access your documents, photos and more from anywhere for free. Going a step further they state that Skydrive has over 100M users, 2.2Petabytes of data stored which includes 250M documents.
But more than just SkyDrive, the Windows live team has been investing in the cloud for over a decade. Microsoft is currently servicing over 500 million customers with Xbox Live, Skydrive, Hotmail and Messenger. Microsoft is touting its statistics to show that iCloud is far from an industry revolution and that Microsoft has been playing in these waters for a very long time.
While the jury is still out on if iCloud will be a successful product, it has put the spotlight back on to cloud related services. For consumers, it is an exciting time as companies compete for your information to be stored in their cloud. For corporations, they have a massive investment that needs to show returns to support the cloud business model.
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