I said a while ago that the days when a significant electronics category can be launched without an 'ecosystem' look numbered. The master of building an ecosystem to exploit and develop hardware has probably been Apple with its iPod/iTunes, iPhone/iPad/apps approach to the market.

This week, Apple announced the iCloud, an attempt to unify these services with some online services from the Mac world and bring them all together under one service heading and with 'everything available in one place'. It seems to me that this is a very big deal if Apple can make it anywhere near as good as it promises. This is, of course, not a given. I have been very aware of what Apple is doing since the late 1970s when I had an Apple ][ and was chairman of the UK Apple User Group. Apple, and especially Steve Jobs in his talks, has always painted a rosy picture of how seamless and simple life would be with a Mac, although the reality hasn't always matched up. (A designer friend told me that he loved his Mac because at least when it crashed it gave him a cute cartoon rather than the 'Blue Screen of Death'!)

Nevertheless, the iCloud concept seems to be a very good way of dealing with a fundamental issue of architecture - the choice between distributed files and resources, which works very well if you don't have a connection to the network, and the cloud/remote working model that works so elegantly, but fails when you are out of reach of a network. As someone that travels a lot, I am always conscious of the fragility and cost of the network once you get away from your home Western city (and don't get me started on the robber barons of international network roaming!).

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