It is now common knowledge that Jobs wanted to acquire Dropbox, a very effective and productive cloud storage solution. With an open API, it has been adopted by a number of third party developers as the preferred cloud storage service of choice. Importantly, Dropbox seems to be able to seamlessly sync large files, regardless of type, across multiple devices quickly and with very little in the way of errors.

iCloud on the other hand is limited when it comes to files - only iWork documents are synced at present, and that too is seamless only between iOS devices. There is no automatic file sync between a Mac and iCloud. Have a large presentation file on your iPad? Forget automatic sync to other devices.

I still find myself using multiple software to solve a common problem - have important documents available on all of my devices, catalogued and readily searchable. Evernote, OfficeDrop, Box - all helps, but never fully. Hopefully future versions of iCloud will address moving to paperless existence more completely. Whilst the current iCloud implementation shows promise, there is still a long way to go. There must be a way to speed up sync, there must be a way to manually disable sync on large files if the user does not want to (why not ask/ warn the user when the file size is large?). I know quite a lot of the issue is bandwidth, connection speed and in the case of portable devices, the battery life. Until these issues all come together, even our beloved computing platform will have a touch of grey in their cloud.