Steve Jobs

it. It would be their strategy for attracting customers into Apple’s orbit for the next decade.
    The new service was named iCloud, and Jobs unveiled it in his keynote address to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2011. He was still on medical leave and, for some days in May, had been hospitalized with infections and pain. Some close friends urged him not to make the presentation, which would involve lots of preparation and rehearsals. But the prospect of ushering in another tectonic shift in the digital age seemed to energize him.
    When he came onstage at the San Francisco Convention Center, he was wearing a VONROSEN black cashmere sweater on top of his usual Issey Miyake black turtleneck, and he had thermal underwear beneath his blue jeans. But he looked more gaunt than ever. The crowdgave him a prolonged standing ovation—“That always helps, and I appreciate it,” he said—but within minutes Apple’s stock dropped more than $4, to $340. He was making a heroic effort, but he looked weak.
    He handed the stage over to Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall to demo the new operating systems for Macs and mobile devices, then came back on to show off iCloud himself. “About ten years ago, we had one of our most important insights,” he said. “The PC was going to become the hub for your digital life. Your videos, your photos, your music. But it has broken down in the last few years. Why?” He riffed about how hard it was to get all of your content synced to each of your devices. If you have a song you’ve downloaded on your iPad, a picture you’ve taken on your iPhone, and a video you’ve stored on your computer, you can end up feeling like an old-fashioned switchboard operator as you plug USB cables into and out of things to get the content shared. “Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” he said to great laughter. “We have a solution. It’s our next big insight. We are going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just a device, and we are going to move the digital hub into the cloud.”
    Jobs was well aware that this “big insight” was in fact not really new. Indeed he joked about Apple’s previous attempt: “You may think, Why should I believe them? They’re the ones who brought me MobileMe.” The audience laughed nervously. “Let me just say it wasn’t our finest hour.” But as he demonstrated iCloud, it was clear that it would be better. Mail, contacts, and calendar entries synced instantly. So did apps, photos, books, and documents. Most impressively, Jobs and Eddy Cue had made deals with the music companies (unlike the folks at Google and Amazon). Apple would have eighteen
million
songs on its cloud servers. If you had any of these on any of your devices or computers—whether you had bought it legally or pirated it—Apple would let you access a high-quality version of it on all of your devices without having to go through the time and effort to upload it to the cloud. “It all just works,” he said.
    That simple concept—that everything would just work seamlessly—was, as always, Apple’s competitive advantage. Microsoft had been advertising “Cloud Power” for more than a year, and three years earlier its chief software architect, the legendary Ray Ozzie, had issued a rallyingcry to the company: “Our aspiration is that individuals will only need to license their media once, and use any of their . . . devices to access and enjoy their media.” But Ozzie had quit Microsoft at the end of 2010, and the company’s cloud computing push was never manifested in consumer devices. Amazon and Google both offered cloud services in 2011, but neither company had the ability to integrate the hardware and software and content of a variety of devices. Apple controlled every link in the chain and designed them all to work together: the devices, computers, operating systems, and application software, along with the sale and storage of the content.
    Of course, it worked seamlessly only if you were using an Apple device and stayed within Apple’s gated garden. That produced another benefit for Apple: customer stickiness. Once you began using iCloud, it would be difficult to switch to a Kindle or Android device. Your music and other content would not sync to them; in fact they might not even work. It was the culmination of three decades spent eschewing open systems. “We thought about whether we should do a music client for Android,” Jobs told me over breakfast the next