woodwing

Last week Apple announced Mountain Lion, the next version of OS X (formerly known as Mac OS X) that will be released this summer. Apple introduces Mountain Lion with: "it’s designed with innovations from iPad and it works even better with iCloud." I find the latter an understatement, this release is all about making OS X a real member of the iCloud family joining iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Apple TV. Mac integration was an important missing piece in Apple's bigger strategy to make iCloud the center of the user's multi-device experience.

Today iCloud with over 100 million users is already leaving the MobileMe debacle behind and it works transparently across iOS devices: your documents are just always available and up-to-date on all your iOS devices. With Mountain Lion it works the same transparent way on the Mac. It's about 15 years ago now that Larry Ellison shared his vision of the Network Computer. Now with ubiquitous (wireless) Internet access it seems that iCloud is finally making this a reality.

For all of us grown up with PC's in a disconnected world we'll have to get used to new paradigms. An example are documents being stored in iCloud per Application. This is one of the things that make us PC savvy people wonder, but it might very well end up to be the right way in a secure connected multi-device world for the masses.