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iTunes Match: Are people really THAT lazy?

So Apple announced iTunes Match as the “one more thing” at WWDC today. For those who haven’t heard yet, this is the one optional add-on for iCloud that is not free.

What iTunes Match does is analyze your iTunes library, finding songs that a) are available in the iTunes store but b) were purchased elsewhere. For $25 a year, Apple will allow you to download those songs to all of your iOS devices and Macs over the air as if you had purchased them on iTunes.

If you want to do the same thing with a USB cable, of course, it’s still free.

So are people really going to sign up for a $25 yearly subscription just to avoid a one-time use of a USB cable? We’re not talking bout USB syncing in general, mind you. Daily changes to things like documents and calendar appointments. All of the other data over iCloud, including your iTunes purchases, you get for free. It’s just the non-iTunes music, and only for that one time you have to sync those songs via a cable.

Am I missing something here?

I buy all my songs from iTunes now. So anything I’m going to buy in the future, I get free syncing via the free iCloud. For anything I ripped from my old CDs from decades ago, I can sync that once whenever I buy a new iPad or iPod or iPhone. Done.

A lot of the music I haven’t bought from iTunes in recent years isn’t available on iTunes anyway. Indie artists selling CDs from their guitar cases on street corners. iTunes match can’t help me there.

Still, I think iTunes Match is a win-win for Apple. It’s a great way for Apple to get a piece of all the music that people are buying from competitors. So if you bought that Lady GaGa album on Amazon for 99 cents instead of paying $9.99 on iTunes, guess what? Apple will still get you for $25 a year so you can sync it over the air. It’s brilliant.

And for those of us like me who aren’t that lazy, or insane, we’ll be that much more encouraged to buy as much of our future music as possible from iTunes, since that way we get the convenience of automatic wireless syncing via iCloud.

KERUFF, responding to Musically's article on Amazon's and Google's online music ventures

>
### > > [Amazon & Google play into Apple’s hands with their early, incomplete music stores](http://musically.com/blog/2011/05/11/google-and-amazons-cloud-lockers-may-play-into-apples-hands/) > > Musically: > > > Apple likes to be late, and better. So by racing to market without licences, have Google and Amazon simply set their services up as the Creative Nomad jukeboxes of the cloud music age? Ironically, by launching without deals from labels, both companies may have given Apple the leverage it needs to strike the very licensing deals that will help its cloud service blow them out of the water. > > I think Musically could be right. And there’s certainly no first mover advantage on the scale that Apple had with the iPad. One month here or there won’t make much difference. Especially as it strikes me that both Amazon and Google have released half baked products that will look pretty shoddy when Apple announces their service, probably in June. > >
via [samradford.com](http://www.samradford.com/post/5427140726/amazon-google-play-into-apples-hands-with-their)
I completely agree, and I’d add that the first mover advantage is even less of an issue in this case, because as of now streaming music lockers is still more of a nerd’s dream than anything the average person knows he or she wants yet.

Until the 4G/WiFi infrastructure improves, having digital music stored in the cloud is much more of a “nice to have” than a replacement for local storage. Especially where I live in San Francisco, the notion of having an iPod that can only get its music from the cloud is silly, at best. I’d be lucky to have 3G or wireless access 40% of the time when I’m away from home or work.

So Apple can certainly take its time here. I wouldn’t be surprised if streaming online music is only a small part of the “iCloud” product. And depending on how long the deal takes with the labels, it may even not be a part of the initial announcement. Amazon and Google sure did make negotiations easier for Apple, though.

It's not your email client; it's you

I was listening to MacBreak Weekly on the way into work this morning, and Alex Lindsay, who I admire greatly, was saying something to the effect that the iPad and iPhone are great, but he still finds it necessary to carry around his 11-inch MacBook Air, because—and I’m paraphrasing here—if you get more than 200 or so emails a day, using iOS devices for that sort of breaks down. The device has to cache too much, it slows down, you have to type on that little keyboard, etc.

I hear this sort of sentiment a lot. “Power users” complaining that various email clients can’t handle their massive daily email load. There needs to be a more robust system to handle my communication needs, etc.

Wouldn’t it be a better idea to take a look at the fact that you’re GETTING MORE THAN 200 EMAILS A DAY as the source of the problem?

There are 24 hours in a day. 8 of them you’re sleeping. That leaves 16 hours. Divide 200 emails by 16 and you get 12.5 emails per hour. That’s 4.8 minutes per email, IF YOU’RE DOING NOTHING AT ALL BUT EMAIL ALL DAY. The most robust email client in the world isn’t going to help you deal with that.

Now, sure, some of those emails are five-second confirmations of something. But other emails require ten-minute, twenty-minute responses. And all of them require some sort of attention, whether it be to file them, send them to junk, etc.

If that much of your day is being dominated by email, your email client is the least of your worries.

Geeks like to use the number of emails they get a day as a bragging right; I see it as a serious lack of organizational skill. You’re using email for things that you shouldn’t.

Think about it; do you get 200 phone calls a day? Maybe if you’re a sports agent you do, but most of us, I would venture, have less than 10 phone call conversations on an average day. Why should email be any different?

So take a look at that inbox. How many of those 200 messages are effective communication, and how many of them are a waste of your time? How many are giving you information that you could more effectively get in other ways? How many are giving you information you HAVE already gotten in other ways? How many of them would be more appropriate in a todo list app, a GTD-type of program, or a ticketing system, or some sort of project management tool?

I’m guessing that you could get that number below 200 pretty quick.

Maybe it’s time to top blaming your email client for not keeping up with you. Maybe it’s time to stop using email as a catch-all for everything you do. Then you can leave the laptop at home and get by on your phone’s email client.

Microsoft trying to coax iOS developers over to Windows Phone 7 - Not going to work

> Jean-Cristophe Cimetiere, Microsoft’s Senior Technical Evangelist for Interoperability, unveiled the [porting tool](http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2011/04/29/leveraging-your-iphone-development-expertise-to-build-windows-phone-7-applications.aspx) in a post to the Windows Team blog last week. The tool comes as part of a interoperability package designed to help iOS developers “leverage [their] iPhone development expertise to build Windows Phone 7 applications.”
via [appleinsider.com](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/05/03/microsoft_aims_to_woo_developers_to_windows_phone_with_ios_porting_tool.html)
Microsoft, like RIM, Adobe, and almost everyone else, hasn’t figured out yet that porting tools are not going to cut it in the mobile software space. You need NATIVE apps to compete with iOS, period. And most iOS developers know this. The good ones do, anyway.

So at best, Microsoft stands to gain the worst of the iOS developers; the ones making crap apps, game guides, all the stuff most of us wish Apple wouldn’t approve in the App Store. That sounds like a real recipe for success.

Apple May Have Snapped Up iCloud.com: GigaOM

> My source, who is familiar with the company, says that Xcerion has sold the domain to Apple for about $4.5 million. Xcerion hasn’t responded to my queries as yet. At the time of writing, the Whois database showed Xcerion as the owner of iCloud.
via [gigaom.com](http://gigaom.com/apple/apple-may-have-snapped-up-icloud-com/)
Two thoughts about this. First, as much as I HOPE Apple doesn’t name its service “i” anything, let alone “iCloud”, this would make perfect sense. The one place where Apple manages to be cheesy and unimaginative is with its names for things. After Magic Trackpad, I gave up all hope of any Apple product having a good name ever again.

Second, if I were this company, and Apple gave me $4.5 million to change my name, I wouldn’t change it to “Cloud Me.” That’s going to give you almost as big a branding issue as iCloud would have. Cloud Me is too much like Mobile Me, isn’t it? It still sounds too much like an Apple product. I can just see the president of this company, shaking hands with Steve Jobs as they sign the deal.

Steve: “So what are you going to change the name to?”

“Cloud Me,” the president says.

Steve: “Ummm, no.”

You’d think they’d change the name to something COMPLETELY un-Apple like, to avoid any sort of confusion. You’d also think that Apple would want to buy iCloud AND Cloud Me, wouldn’t you?

Maybe that was another $4.5 million. But with $65 billion in the bank, why not buy a little extra added comfort?

Or maybe Apple actually bought this whole company, not just the name? Maybe Apple’s service will be called “Cloud Me,” not “iCloud.”

I just hope we find out soon. The rumor mill is starting to eat itself.