Apple is known for its proprietary and closed ecosystem, Microsoft is known to own markets and Google is the open kid 🙂 But it seems that Microsoft is taking lessons from both, Google and Apple when designing its mobile strategy. Firstly you have the Windows Phone 7 offering that has good cloud and social integration, Google / Apple keep fighting Facebook / Twitter, Microsoft embraces both. Competing with Picasa (Google Plus) and iCloud, Microsoft has its SkyDrive 25GB free storage with a Live ID that is integrated very well in Windows Phone. But they don’t stop there.Â
Microsoft has released a SkyDrive app for iOS (and WP7 too). You can access your SkyDrive data on your iPad, iPhonr or iPod touch now and also uplaod photos from your iOS device to SkyDrive. iCloud on the other hand gives you 5GB storage and PhotoStream only backs up your last 1000 photos. With iCloud you do not have a way to upload documents etc directly from your iPhone, heck you don’t even have office apps bundled like Windows Phone. This is one area WP7 might take a lead very soon.
iOS users might want to use the free 25GB storage on SkyDrive and this might be a little trouble for DropBox as well. But the way we see it making more impact is, a Live ID holder can access his / her data over the web, on a Windows device and even an iOS device. For an iOS user, accessing their data is a bit more trickier on a Windows device. Better storage space and better access to content might help Microsoft’s SkyDrive push here, we wonder now if they would also push out an Android app soon 🙂