Virtual Pants

John Paczkowski:

So, as the 2013 Apple rumor mill ramps up, and the prognosticators wonder whether the company’s product pipeline includes a television, a watch, or both, consider this: While Apple could likely use another disruptive innovation on which to build its continued success, what it really needs — crucially — is to do Web services well.

Because to do them poorly is to weaken the hardware and software on which Apple prides itself. These days, our experiences of Web services are part and parcel of our experience of the devices on which they run. When Maps for iOS fails, the iPhone fails with it. Certainly that was the view taken by investors, who whacked $30 billion from Apple’s market cap in the days following the Maps fiasco.

Apple’s biggest web services challenge is their lack of a Dropbox-like service. As John Gruber has pointed out (several times), Dropbox is the linchpin for iOS. Google has Drive, Microsoft has SkyDrive, Amazon has Cloud Drive, and then there’s Dropbox. Either Apple needs their own version or needs to acquire Dropbox before someone else does. Otherwise, they will remain dependent on a third-party for a key web service. To be honest, it’s absolutely baffling that they haven’t developed something yet.