Yesterday Steve Jobs appeared onstage to launch iCloud, the forthcoming attempt by Apple to abandon wires in favour of a Dropbox-like automatic syncing. From late summer iOS devices will be able to sync wirelessly, both with desktop Macs and PCs and with the new iCloud service.

When I say Dropbox-like I could equally well say SugarSync-like. The reason I don’t is that I have never used SugarSync seriously. I experimented with it several years ago before deciding to go with Dropbox and, although it has grown in leaps and bounds since the time I played with it, I have never felt any need to leave Dropbox. This is mainly because Dropbox is one of the few things on my computer to ever “just work”.

Notwithstanding all this, I follow the SugarSync blog, and this morning Laura Yecies posted an interesting piece about Device Lockin in the Cloud Industry.

She points out that Apple’s iCloud is no different from the offerings from Google, Amazon or Microsoft in one crucial respect. They all offer cloud services that are restricted to one platform or one class of device. She says that

The simple fact of the matter is that most people today do not live in a single-platform environment, so these services that are based on platform/device lock-in alienate a great deal of the potential users. Android, iOS, Blackberry and other mobile platforms offer different features and benefits that appeal to different users and often times those different users may be in the same family or business. Say, for instance, that you’re an Apple fanboy at home – but your job requires you to use a PC and an Android device or Blackberry. You would not be able to backup your pictures, access your photos or listen to your music from your Android or BlackBerry using iCloud. Or consider another common scenario – you have an iPhone/iPad, but your husband (and/or kids, etc.) have Android smartphones or Tablets. Neither iCloud, Google Music or Amazon Cloud Player would work across all the devices in your home.

She goes on to say that at SugarSync

SugarSync, we believe the Cloud is the ultimate agent of freedom, unlocking ALL of our users’ data, anytime, anywhere, and on ANY device. That includes iOS devices, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian (for the hundreds of millions of people internationally that prefer Symbian)

which of course the people at Dropbox could also say about Dropbox. And probably will.

She is correct in her analysis and the problem of lock-in is an increasingly important issue, as formats and platforms come and go. Anyone who has ever tried to move their calendars, contacts and task lists from a Palm device to an iPad will recognise the level of research and ingenuity sometimes required to get the data from one platform to another in a usable form.

Local vs Remote

Dropbox, iCloud and SugarSync do all agree on another important issue, though, concerning how we should view the cloud and how we should relate our devices to it.

I have been a cloud enthusiast since I first saw Writely (the web start-up that Google bought in 2006, and used as the basis for Google Docs) and first visited Zoho’s development team in Chennai. However in the five years I have been using online tools I have modified my position about them. Initially I thought that all data will migrate to the web. Now I think that all data will be synced and shared over the net, and made available when necessary on the web.

I began to switch views when I found myself in the Finnish countryside one summer with no possibility of a web connection. At that point I moved sideways from Zoho Writer (a wonderful word processor) and began using ThinkFree, which combined a desktop word processor written in Java, with a web app and online storage. This worked in the same way as Evernote. It saved files locally and then synced them to the online storage space either automatically or manually. This meant that I could work in Helsinki with my files syncing to Thinkfree.com, and then work in the countryside with my files saving locally and then syncing when I returned to the city.

The only problem with this arrangement was that ThinkFree slavishly followed the MS Word interface (because, to be fair, that was its perceived selling point) and I neither needed nor liked this. Once I found Dropbox I was able to customise the process, because Dropbox performed the same function of syncing locally stored files tothe web without tying me to a single word processor.

Minimalist sequencing

After experimentation I now use the minimalistic Writemonkey on my laptop and the even more minimalistic iA Writer on my iPad for creative writing, linking them through Dropbox so that they are always in sync. Then I use Microsoft Word when I have a finished piece of writing that needs complex formatting to fit some external schema.

In my view the iPad is excellent for creative writing with the right, minimalist tools, but is not much good for using Office clones. The result is that I have now gone back to the established routine I used to use before I ever used computers. Instead of attempting to combine writing, editing and formatting into one (often muddled and distracting) process, I concentrate on writing first and then I do any necessary editing and formatting later. Not only does this appear to have profound creative advantages, it also leaves me with plain text files at the end of the writing period. I can then vary the rest of the sequence: I can then mark them up for the web, or as epubs, or I can format them in Word for print.

From this perspective the view of the Cloud espoused by Dropbox, iCloud and SugarSync (as well as Evernote and ThinkFree) trumps the entirely webcentric view proposed by Google and Zoho. I want my data available and usable anywhere, but I don’t necessarily want to use the same tools everywhere, and there are many occasions when I won’t be able to even if I want to.