Apple's Next Battleground Isn't TV; It's Web Services

There are hands-down fiascos: MobileMe, Ping and Maps. And there are works in progress: Game Center, iTunes Match and iCloud. And all of them speak to a troubling deficiency that Apple just can’t seem to overcome. One that’s garnering increasingly more public scrutiny. One that, at its worst — say with the disastrous Maps debacle — shows up the company that prides itself on building the “magical and revolutionary” as fallible.

via allthingsd.com

Now read this from an Apple event where Steve Jobs introduced iCloud after Mobileme's failure:
"Why should I believe them? They're the ones that brought me to MobileMe,"

There is still no reason to believe that Apple can do web services. The economics and business models of building and running web services is totally different than making great hardware with equally impressive software running on them. Apple would stick to it’s core competencies and whatever it does on the web services side will be best done through an acquisition.