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the multiplier effect of luring app developers and other companies to use
Google products and to launch from the Google platform.
It is hard to contend with the view that Apple has succeeded in creat-
ing a successful consumer cloud. With iCloud and iTunes Match, Apple
has the largest share of the consumer cloud-services market in the United
States, substantially ahead of Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive, and Google
Drive. Moreover, the sheer size of Apple's data centers in the United States
(its North Carolina facility alone is one of the largest in the world) and
its seemingly constant process of expansion demonstrate the company's
continuing popularity. So do the sales of its line of computers, tablets,
and smartphones (Fingas 2013). Much of this success can be traced
to the vision of its founder Steve Jobs, who recognized the importance of
the cloud in 2008 and committed to it in 2011 when, although ill with
the cancer that would soon take his life, he announced to a Worldwide
Developers Conference the company's “next big insight”: “We are going
to demote the PC and the Mac to be just a device and we are going to
move the digital hub into the cloud” (Isaacson 2011, 533). While Google,
Facebook, and Twitter garner attention as media disrupters, Apple has
become one of the world's largest media companies by creating cloud ver-
sions of traditional media. Apple's iTunes Store and App Store, through
which people purchase music, video, and e-publications, earn more money
than the combined revenue of the
New York Times
, the Simon & Schuster
publishing company (which put out the best-selling biography of Apple's
founder), Warner Bros. ilm studios, and Time Inc. (the largest magazine
publisher in the United States). For the iscal year ending September 2012
Apple's media cloud services earned about $8.5 billion, or $300 million
more than the combined revenues of the others (Lee 2012). Because Apple
does not clearly break out its pure media sales from those, for example, of
its nonmedia apps, not all of its iTunes earnings come solely from media.
Furthermore, Apple's content division is still dwarfed by conglomerates
like News Corp. and Disney. Nevertheless, Apple's cloud media is increas-
ing at a 35 percent annual rate, making it the fastest-growing commercial
media operation in the world.
As successful as it has been in consumer services, Apple has barely made
a dent in the business market for cloud services. When it has tried—for
example, with iWeb, a website-publishing service—the company has
failed to win over customers from its business-services competition. As
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