Steve Clayton's Blog

The iPhone is a great example of cloud computing – or more accurately Software plus Service. I’ve said this at a few recent conferences and it always gets a raised eyebrow when I put an iPhone in my presentation but it gets the message across. The combination of Internet connected devices and Internet delivered services is the direction the industry is headed.

To quote Steve Jobs from the All Things D conference:

"I think the marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful and right now, can be way more powerful than just having a browser on the client"

How the iPhone is Cloud Computing's Killer App conveniently forgets that the original premise of the iPhone was to deliver apps through the browser in a SaaS fashion but now embraces rich clients. It also sort of suggests that the iPhone connecting to Exchange over the air is a big new thing when Windows Mobile has been doing this for years.

The point still stands though – the iPhone is a great cloud connected device that demonstrates the power of (rich client) Software combined with (Internet delivered) Services.