TheStreet has a story by Anton Wahlman titled Apple Plays Catch-up with Its Offerings, and it ends with the following quote. I would like to know more…”Apple’s new Cloud services will be a good solution for many people. I’m of course a big Apple user myself. But many people want software/services products that maintain the functionality across devices based on all the other operating systems and are made by other hardware players. I want to access all of these iCloud services and information on my Android, BlackBerry and Microsoft devices, among others. Google and Dropbox have been doing this for years. And as for the Match music stuff, it’s already available from Best Buy using CatchMedia’s “Play Anywhere” technology.”

More than two years ago I availed myself of Lala’s Music Mover service (essentially identical to the iTunes Match service) to obtain remote access to the vast bulk of my music library — whenever or wherever — so long as I had internet access to log into my account on Lala’s browser based music player.  As is commonly known, Apple obtained this “music-matching” and streaming know-how when it purchased Lala in December 2009.  The only key distinction is that now that smartphones are more ubiquitous, users naturally would like the ability to stream to their mobile device as they previously were able to stream to their laptop or desktop PC.  That is, the only “new” development is the increasing and subsantial reliance on mobile internet connectivity via telecoms (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc.) rather than broadband.  It would appear then, that denying users the choice of a streaming service stems not from any technological hurdle, but rather a business (some might say “political”) decision to avoid burdening the 3G and forthcoming 4G spectrum.

I guess I would like a little more transparency as to why Apple has decided to deny its users a technology it plainly has the capacity to deliver.  (I know, asking for transparency from Apple is like wishing upon a star).  Still, given these facts, I am perplexed by some of the tech media’s rapturous reponses to iCloud (present compay excluded — rather see e.g., gizmodo’s paean to iCloud http://t.co/pTvN5Co).  Yeah, its an improvement on Apple’s previous offerings, but still remains very weak tea.

And FWIW, I’m not a hater.  I am nearly exclusively a consumer of Apple hardware and that’s probably the source of my frustration.  Nothing that was announced on Monday (even the iOS and Lion stuff) met any reasonable standard of a major leap forward.  Oh well.  I still hold out hope that all that changes and we are treated to something incomparable and amazing in September.  The fanboy in me still kicking somewhere.

What OS’ will and won’t iCloud support?  I have seen a lot of reporting that the answer is Vista, Windows 7 and Lion, but I haven’t seen a CLEAR confirmation.  If that is really the case, it would be somewhat surprising that it won’t be supported on Snow Leopard…

Perhaps in the future this will change.  Nevertheless, streaming vs no-streaming seems like a pretty significant distinction that should have been more clearly set forth in your otherwise very helpful post.