Steve Jobs is apparently hoping that iCloud will break Apple’s losing streak on building cloud-based devices, and he’s hoping that the tens of millions of dollars the company has poured into its gigantic new data center in North Carolina will make the difference this time. But he may be stuck with the strengths and weaknesses of the company he has built over the last 35 years. We wish him well, but we won’t be surprised to see stories in the coming months about iCloud having performance and reliability issues.
While I think iCloud will be a solid service from Day 1, it is hard to ignore Apple’s failings in this space before.