Once Bitten
William Gallagher interviews Ken Case:
Apple now provides iCloud, a service that amongst other things keeps apps in sync across many devices, yet the Omni Group ignore that in favor of its own alternative. That product has a better name -- it’s called OmniPresence -- but it is really duplicating what Apple is already doing. “Well, iCloud is really great when it works. I’ll put it that way,” says Case.
“When it doesn’t work, then customers blame us, but we have nothing we can do to try to fix their problems. When we shipped the first versions of all of our software on iOS, all of them supported WebDAV.” This was part of Apple’s predecessor to iCloud, and performed much the same job of syncing. “Well, of course we all know what happened: after they introduced iCloud, they turned off the WebDAV access, and suddenly everybody who was syncing through Apple’s once-supported service were upset because their Omni apps stopped syncing.
“So I guess there’s an element of once bitten, twice shy. If we then switched to Apple’s iCloud, then we would bitten again when the next thing comes along. I think it’s great that Apple does keep moving forward, but we need to make sure we can support our customers, and we couldn’t do it very well when we were building on top of services that could go away at any moment; that we didn’t have control over.”
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