Apple counters Microsoft's convergence strategy with Continuity

Apple yesterday unveiled its answer to Microsoft's vision of the future, where multiple devices collapse into one, where compromises are allegedly not allowed, with a recognition that compromises and multiple devices are not only the reality, but potentially lucrative if leveraged.

"Continuity," the term Apple applied to a wide range of features and technologies it will insert into both OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 this fall, was the key to Apple's multi-device acknowledgement, said analysts, its reply to Microsoft's -- and its OEM partners' -- theory that customers want to reduce the number of things they carry.

"These were the most important capabilities Apple unveiled yesterday by far," said Bob O'Donnell, principal analyst at Technalysis Research, in a post to Techpinions today. "Finally, we can start to see a world where the devices play a secondary role to the people and what it is they want to get done."

Continuity is Apple's umbrella label for several distinct technologies. Prominent among them is "Handoff," where iOS 8- and OS X Yosemite-powered devices, using proximity awareness, will be able to hand off in-progress tasks, like a half-finished document or email, from one to the other. Start a Pages document on a Mac, for instance, and pick it up on the iPad for completion.

Other Continuity features included receipt of text messages on Macs, taking and receiving phone calls from the Mac, and an instant ad hoc Wi-Fi hotspot triggered when an iPhone is near a connection-less Mac.

Adjuncts like iCloud Drive, a Dropbox-like enhancement of Apple's online storage service, and Family Sharing -- content-, calendar-, notification-sharing between multiple devices in a household -- also play roles in handling multiple devices.

The play is certainly to an Apple strength -- its hardware lineup of smartphone, tablet and personal computer -- and self-centered in that it's a naked ploy to sell more of its own gear, not accommodate others'. But it is a clue to how it sees things.

Microsoft, by contrast, pushes convergence: It believes that users want to dump two devices -- tablet and laptop -- and replace them with a single chunk of glass, a 2-in-1, specifically its Surface Pro 3. Redmond's partners have jumped on the bandwagon, including Intel, which touted a reference-design tablet/hybrid at Taiwan's Computex trade show on Monday.

Although Microsoft may have muted its 2012 mantra of "no compromises" that it used to describe Windows 8, its pitch for the Surface Pro 3 made plain that it still believes in convergence. "This is the tablet that can replace your laptop," claimed Panos Panay, Microsoft's top Surface executive, when he introduced the 2-in-1 two weeks ago.

Then, analysts wondered how Apple would respond to Microsoft's explicit claim that multiple devices generated friction.

"Apple could reduce friction through the cloud," maintained Ross Rubin in an interview a week ago. "You could watch a movie on one device and pick it up in progress on another. Documents in the cloud, you could pick up a document edited right where you left off."

Rubin was prescient, nailing Continuity's Handoff days before Apple unveiled it.

Others argued after the Surface Pro 3 debut that, no matter how many times Microsoft denies it, compromise is a fact.

"Every device has compromises, in cost, power, size and portability," said Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research. "We've always used different devices for different things. Before, those different devices were very separate, now they're variations of the same thing. Tablets have essentially the same components as smartphones, dedicated desktop PCs have the same components as tablets. It's really about the form factor, the size of the screen, the power of the microprocessor, memory and storage. But you're always making trade-offs, not least of which is the price."