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iCloud is #5 in Top 10 Cloud Storages
iCloud is cloud service done right. It stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more. And wirelessly pushes them to all your devices.
iCloud video
Positions in ratings
#5 in Top 10 Cloud Storages
Alternatives
The best alternatives to iCloud are: DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive
Latest news about iCloud
2014. Apple iCloud to get folders with files, Windows app
Cloud file storage and sync service iCloud is not loved even by Apple fanboys. Because first, it can only sync the internal app files so that user can't access them outside these apps. Second, it's expensive ($20 for 20GB) - this price that only Dropbox can afford. Third, it only works on Apple devices (and yes, even Apple fanboys are tied of this closed garden). So Apple has introduced the service update, which is now called iCloud Drive, which works more like Dropbox - it allows you to sync any folders with any files. Moreover, additionally to Mac and iOS apps it will provide client for Windows. And the pricing will be reduced - from $0.99/month for 20 GB. The free volume won't charge - 5 GB. All this will become available this fall with the release of new iOS 8 and OSX Yosemite.
2013. Apple launches iWork for iCloud
Historically Apple doesn't like to build business applications, but Office - is still an important part of the platform and competitors (Microsoft and Google) got far ahead in this aspect. So Apple decided to fix, perhaps, the main drawback of its office suite - the absence of online version. In June, at the WWDC conference Apple officially introduced iWork for iCloud and now the online apps Pages, Numbers and Keynote are available to all in the iCloud online accounts (in beta). However, at the moment, these editors can only bring a smile for MS Office and Google Docs users. For example, the text editor Pages even doesn't allow to add tables and spell check works only in English. There are no collaboration tools. But the good news is that you can upload and edit MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents (and formatting sometimes isn't corrupted) and download documents in MS Office formats and PDF.
2011. Apple iCloud delighted SaaS vendors
As you probably know, on Monday, Steve Jobs once again climbed on the stage to introduce another revolutionary thing. And at this time the thing was not small and metallic, but big and virtual - iCloud - the new center of Apple's strategy. In general, for us (from the enterprise point of view) this iCloud - is not very interesting. It allows you to sync all your content and apps across all your Apple-devices (iPad, iPhone, Mac). I.e. iCloud can only help to improve personal productivity. However, the emergence of iCloud caused delighted reaction among SaaS-vendors (Box.net, Zoho, Salesforce). First, they seem to be happy that iCloud won't compete with them. iCloud works only with Apple-devices and provides no collaborative features. But at the same time, iCloud marks the global shift from the desktop (or any device) to the Cloud. If Steve Jobs at his own says that the center is no longer in the iPhone or in the iPad, but in the cloud, then people will believe in it. And enterprises are ruled by the same people.
