This is one hundred percent a personal opinion, but I suspect its one that I'm not alone in.

I use iCloud and Dropbox, I don't even really see how they're competitors from my perspective. iCloud does things like sync my iCal calendars and Safari bookmarks, and Dropbox allows me to maintain a shared filesystem between all my computers.

Dropbox is a form of free form backup/sharing, while iCloud is just a convenient way to keep defined, structured data together for me.

Apple's goal with iCloud and Air* is not to compete with Dropbox. iCloud, in general, seems poised so that no matter what device it originated on, you can find your data.

Take a look at PhotoStream. Yes, you can't delete individual files, and yes, it has very few features. That's not the point. The bottom line is that any photo you took on your iPhone appears almost immediately on your other Apple devices. You can view them on your AppleTV, you can flip through them on your iPad, you can download them to iPhoto. There's no extra step, the photos just appear.

iCloud is Apple's attempt for this to happen for all of your data. Airdrop is a red herring. It's to solve the short-term problem of "I have a file on Computer A, and I want to transfer it to Computer B." In the end, ideally, this would never happen. Your app of choice would grab the file from iCloud seamlessly.

I don't think Apple cares that this doesn't work on Windows. Like the new owner of the Jaguars said, "I think I can clarify at this point for me a fan is somebody who is a season ticket holder."

I view Apple as still very much a newbie in this space. Sure, they can make it pretty and shiny, but I see them balking on the harder engineering challenges.

For example, because I was one of the doomed MobileMe users, I ended up having two Apple IDs for my Apple assets. As a result of moving to iCloud, I had to ditch one set of assets. Apple assumes you only have one Apple ID, which is fine, but they do not offer you a way to merge two Apple accounts. In other words, their walled garden is so tightly walled it doesn't even play nicely with itself.

Another example is that they don't have a good user experience around communicating what is going to happen when moving data from one device to another. I had the hardest time getting my contacts from my old iPhone to iCloud. What ended up happening is that I had to manually transfer the info (yes, look at the iPhone contacts, type them into a file, then manually type them back into my new iPhone) and actually in the process of moving to iCloud I accidentally deleted all of my contacts without warning. Oops!

So Apple is still really green when it comes to smoothing out all of the rough edges of this complex engineering challenge. My experience with DropBox has been closer to the "it just works" experience.

Right conclusion (iCloud is DOA), but wrong reasoning.

Lots of people are 100% Apple ecosystem (I use Linux and FreeBSD servers, but all my desktops/phones/laptops/etc. are Apple). I have only ever used Dropbox from Apple platforms, too.

Yet, I still use Dropbox, and not iCloud. Why? Because so far, iCloud has been totally useless. iTunes Match is marginally useful, but it was done internally by Apple as a first-party thing (and really, iTunes and all online Apple services are an embarrassment to a company which is so good at design; even the online Apple Store is crap compared to their physical retail presence. Some people should hate each other for every Apple Internet service.)

Basically no non-Apple first-party apps support iCloud in any meaningful way. 1Password, Chrome, ... Plenty of third-party apps support Dropbox API.

Dropbox may have three main things going for it (simple initial "put stuff in a folder", cross-platform, and great API), but any ONE of those is sufficient. Cross-platformness is the easiest one to discount (since even Dropbox isn't cross-platform to the platforms I really care about, like Audi RNS-E, various fitness tracking devices, people who aren't currently dropbox users, ...).

iCloud is an umbrella term. It makes no sense to compare iCloud to Dropbox. Dropbox doesn't provide app syncing (calendar, contacts, mail, alarms, etc.), it doesn't provide photo syncing, nor Music Match, or anything else iCloud provides and conversely iCloud doesn't provide a portable file system like Dropbox does. At some point iCloud could bundle Dropbox -like services under the iCloud name, but at this point it doesn't.

I use photo stream all the time, rely on contact and calendar syncing, use share music between all my devices AND use dropbox daily. Not once have I had to decide if I should use dropbox for this or iCloud. They simply don't step on each others toes.

One of the great things about iCloud is that you don't actually "use" it. It just sort of works (yeah yeah I know).

Dropbox is for file sharing. iCloud lets you forget about files. I don't really view them as competitors, at least not direct competitors.

Drop box is just obvious next step: taking file-system to the cloud. Apple is just unfortunately clumsy or it is up to something...

I have Apple ecosystem in my home and within couple of my friends. I just love how it all works together well. Except one thing: sharing and syncing.

The document sharing between computer and ipad through iTunes->iPad->Apps->App (in second! list) is just overcomplicated and does not even allow real synchronisation. That way of sharing breaks logical document coupling as well (by-project, for example). The way of sharing documents between apps is limited as well and it forces me to have duplicates... There many other little things.

I think (and strongly hope) that this is just a transient period. Looks like Apple would like to get rid of classical file system "feel" on the user's side. They either have no human friendly solution yet (measured on Apple standards) or want to do it step-by-step, so users can accommodate to changes gradually.

iCloud is application/document type based storage, iPad is application based file storage. They even added a view to finder: "All My Files", which also hides classical file system way of browsing files.

I do not think that Apple is done with file management evolution. But I feel, that the classical hierarchical file system structure is not the way to go in the cloud based file system...Consider not only your document syncing, but also synchronized file sharing with custom categorization...

>Sadly, iCloud only supports Apple devices (which is understandable) but that means that it will never be what it aspires to be. iCloud is unpractical and reserved for the Mac addict that never touches any other computer.

Don't know if I'm missing some subtlety here, but I've got iCloud running happily on my Windows PC. Details on how to do are on the Apple website - http://www.apple.com/icloud/setup/pc.html

This is why I could never buy into the comment Steve Jobs supposedly made that Dropbox is just a feature.

I'm still not convinced about the Dropbox developer experience though. I would think web integration is key to them winning. Similar to the way FB wants Like buttons everywhere, Dropbox wants Dropbox This everywhere. And yet, there's no way to pass a URL and say "store that". Dev has to pull the URL and copy it across, every time, and Dropbox has no idea it's the same URL.

A bit specific, but an example where Dropbox needs to invest its new capital into making life easier for developers, especially if similar products from say Google or Amazon emerge...which would presumably be cross-platform, unlike Apple's offering.

We use Airdrop a lot for sharing large files over our local network, for that it works great, and is a lot more efficient than Dropbox. But I agree that it would be more useful if it's an open protocol.

With respect to iCloud - it makes little sense to make it generally available. It's an free add-on (except iTunes Match) that ties you into 'the Apple platform'. If you and your applications use iCloud for synchronization, and it's limited to iOS and OS X, there is one more hoop to jump through if you want to switch to another platform.

Whether Apple succeeds on that front, we have to see, and depends on things such as adoption by third-party application developers.

iCloud's main draw is that provides MobileMe sync features for free. Anyone who expects it to be a serious dropbox competitor when the folder based filesystem is still prevalent isn't seeing why people are using iCloud.

If you string together the cases of Appletalk, iChat, ping, FaceTime, and now iCloud (photo stream in particular), the Apple model of 'communication' seems always limited to the apple ecosystem. Apple doesn't seem to understand that even if I have a full-Apple setup, people I want to communicate with may not. As long as they don't see this as a fundamental issue, folks like Dropbox need not worry. Once they do see it, though, and they decide to bring their design sense to it all ..... hmmm I must be dreaming.

If anyone is interested in figuring out how AirDrop works .. I registered OpenAirDrop.org a long time ago. I would be happy to point it to a github site.

Isn't one of the main features of airdrop that it can work in the absence of a network by creating its own adhoc network? I believe that in order for this to work when you ARE connected to a network, it rapidly switches the NIC between the two networks. Making airdrop "open" doesn't mean that any computer can make use of the protocol.

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Airdrop is not a Dropbox competitor, it's a replacement for t he 'public folder/drop box' feature of OS X.

AirDrop is great at college: most people have macs where I go to school and don't know what fileshares are. "go to this icon in your sidebar and press accept" is much easier than putting it on a fileshare.

The author took the link down.