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Comment by naeem | Hacker News Reader

It's good and bad to see Apple really joining in to the cloud phenomenon. On the good note, nobody has really built a cloud service worth using yet, so Apple may very well be the first to do that. On the bad side, it's Apple, so it's probably going to come with a cost and interested developers will probably have to handcuff their left hand to a mac.

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> On the good note, nobody has really built a cloud service worth using yet

Dropbox and Flickr are both pretty good...

Or, um, Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo! Mail.

Or Google Docs, Google Calendar, Evernote...

It's fairly hard to find a large Web service which isn't "cloud" in some sense. Doesn't nearly all of Netflix run on Amazon AWS?

Stop downvoting this man and post a response. Do you folks not think these are cloud services?

A true cloud service decouples your usage from your data. Email has almost always been "cloud" (IMAP, anyway).

Dropbox and Flickr? Those aren't good examples of cloud services to me because I think the biggest benefit of the cloud is that you can stop using a service but still have access to your data.

I'm working on that :) - http://openphoto.me

I'm curious as to why you think Dropbox isn't a good example. You can walk away at any time and all your data is still exactly where it was last sync'd. That seems to be ideal.

Not if you decide you don't want to use Dropbox anymore. Your data is tied to their service (and terms of use and privacy policy and pricing).

What?! That’s not how Dropbox works.

The Dropbox app creates a local copy of your data that will sync with your data in the cloud. The result of this is that you always have a local copy of your data. If you stop using Dropbox all the data remains where it is on your computer.

Ok, you do have (kinda) a point with Dropbox since they store the file locally on all computers.

What I'm saying though, is that the cloud storage (not local) can be decoupled from the service. Such that if I decide I don't want to use Dropbox anymore, I still have a access copy of my files in the cloud - just not via the Dropbox software.

Imagine if Dropbox sync'ed your local files with your personal Amazon S3 bucket. That's what I'm hinting at.

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