The headline says it all, folks. While our sister site The VAR Guy might be focusing on how record iPhone and iPad sales led Apple to blockbuster Q4 2011 revenues, this is TalkinCloud, and we’re most interested in a little tidbit that came out on the earnings call: Apple Senior VP and CFO Peter Oppenheimer reported iCloud has more than 85 million subscribers.
iCloud was one of Steve Jobs’ final initiatives. And apparently, he delivered the goods. For comparison, cloud storage poster child Dropbox only reported 59 million users at the end of 2011. It’s not a huge mystery, though: If Apple sold 37 million iPhones and 15 million iPads in the fourth quarter alone, the deep iCloud integration (for syncing contacts, calendars and backups) makes for a lot of new customers for the three-month-old service. Between the influx of new Apple iOS 5 devices and existing users upgrading, there’s a heck of a lot of users being pushed into Apple’s walled garden.
“It’s not a product. It’s a strategy for the next decade,” Oppenheimer said on iCloud’s future.
Okay, 85 million subscribers is a lot for a consumer cloud service (or any cloud service, frankly). Tying your cloud service deeply to an immensely popular mobile platform seems to be a valid strategy for building a user base — look at the Amazon Kindle Fire — but obviously that’s not going to work for all cloud service providers.
Regardless, more users means more potential customers who understand what we talk about when we talk about the cloud. And as Apple continues to develop its cloud play, it’s going to set the bar, for better or for worse.
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