Almost two months ago, I wrote a piece on problems with the iCloud. Apple’s next upgrade to the Mac OS X, dubbed as Mountain Lion, fixes some of those issues.

Here are a few I mentioned earlier, and will be resolved in the next version of OS X.

1) Second is that there is no app called Notes on a Mac. You have to find it under Mail application, which I never use!

Mountain Lion indeed will have a separate application called Notes.

2) With Contacts and Calendars, at least the naming is (nearly) consistent.

I said nearly because on Mac, Calendar is known as iCal, and Contacts as Address Book. Not with Mountain Lion anymore. iCal will be renamed to Calendar, and Address Book to Contacts.

3) Reminders app doesn’t have a naming counterpart on Mac, and is hidden under iCal. With Lion OS moving closer to the iOS model there is even more reason for having a separate app for Reminders.

Mountain Lion will have a separate Reminders app.

There are other improvements as well: for example, all iWork documents, and not just Pages, will be synced to the cloud. This is by no means absolution for iCloud, but a step in the right direction. More than offering a better iCloud, the new OS just goes a step further in becoming an even closer cousin to iOS.

(For more on how Mac and iOS devices are converging, read Back to the Mac or welcome to the iOS?)
(iCloud just passed 100M users, but how telling is that number? Read iCloud reaches 100M users mark, so what?)

Tim Cook announced today that Apple’s iCloud, within a few months of its launch, has now more than 100M users. On the surface, the number might look impressive, but is it really? I am afraid not.

I would have liked to see a few other parameters that would tell me a lot more about iCloud’s momentum (or lack thereof), but I don’t think Apple would be very proud to share them at least yet. Let’s look at a few of them:

- Number of paid subscribers (Apple charges beyond 5GB of free storage). Arguably 5GB is a lot because a lot of stuff such as the most 1000 recent pictures and music and TV shows bought from iTunes does not count toward the 5GB limit. But it would still be nice to know how many people tryst iCloud to be their primary cloud storage and are therefore willing to pay for it.

Steve Jobs fired Mobile Me’s Product Manager for not delivering on the promise. I wonder whether he’d react as strongly to iCloud were he alive.

Despite constant rants from several analysts about the way Apple has limited iCloud’s scope to Apple’s devices, I personally do not care much about that (perhaps because I consistently use several Apple devices). I also welcome how Apple has tried to approach the problem of the cloud very differently: Apple’s iCloud marries the power and richness of native applications with the comfort of syncing them to the cloud and being able to access them from anywhere (as long as it is from an Apple device). At least in theory.

Battle between Google and Apple keeps getting more interesting, especially in the mobile arena. On the one hand several analysts liken the iOS vs. Android race to Mac vs. Windows in the 1980’s; claiming that when it comes to grabbing market share, iOS walled garden approach is no match to Android’s openness. On the other hand, Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility’s has led several to believe that tight coupling between smartphone hardware and operating system will help Google compete more effectively against Apple.

It took me less than a minute between hearing a song and buying it. Arguably it could have been even faster were I using all Apple gadgets (rather than a mix between Google’s and Apple’s for example), but it’s still a significant improvement over how long the same process would have taken a few years ago.

Remember when Google Buzz made its debut and how the media and Buzz users were in a frenzy? The usage was high, and the product was thus hailed as a Facebook killer. While I was fairly impressed by the overall strategy underlying the product, I didn’t think it would spell the death of Facebook or Twitter. What I, like many others, didn’t see was that the fall of Buzz would be even more rapid than its rise.

This raises questions over the prospects of Google+. Does it have better chances of thriving or will it too not survive?

Recently, Steve Ballmer has been under a lot of fire. To be fair, Microsoft’s inability to ease investors’ concerns and raise MSFT’s stock price is not Ballmer’s fault alone. Microsoft is facing disruptive innovations — in areas as mobile, cloud computing/virtualization/web-based applications and OS’es) driven primarily by Google and Apple. — at a scale that would be hard to counter for anyone at the helm of a giant like Microsoft.

I have contemplated “cutting the cord” for a long time. Today I actually did it; I canceled the Comcast cable service. I thought I’d share my experience and the journey I have gone through while getting here. Is cutting the cord really worth it? Let’s find out.

I have been a Comcast customer for a long time. Unlike many others, I have had no major issues with the customer service. Cable service itself is pretty decent. Comcast (and I am sure, most other cable or satellite providers) does a very good job at distributing more than enough channels than you’d need. Even with Digital Starter package, you get a fairly nice selection of movies, news, and other channels. Moreover with their TV Everywhere/Xfinity offering, they are at least trying to be more innovative.

I have been trying Google’s +1 for the last few days. Not surprisingly I also tried Bing’s search to compare it against Google’s to see who offers a better social search experience.

On the surface, Google’s +1 seems like a smart move: While it is not meant to counter Facebook or Twitter the way Buzz was supposed to, it is clearly a direct response to Facebook’s Likes, which, in addition to Facebook itself, can be found on several third party sites. Google’s +1 also has an added advantage of showing up in Google ads thus potentially further strengthening its advertising ecosystem.

Many people expect that Amazon will soon enter the burgeoning tablet arena increasingly dominated by Apple. While few expect the rumored Amazon tablet to be a viable threat to the iPad’s dominance, many think that it could earn a comfortable niche in the middle tier of the market. I, however, disagree with most analysts.