Tim Cook: iCloud Is Becoming Central to Our Business

Apple’s CEO is hinting to Wall Street analysts that they should keep an eye out for any product that integrates with iCloud in the next ten years, as the service has become central to Apple’s business.

In a conference call that had been scheduled for a while, Apple posted a new record quarter beating Wall Street’s consensus by a margin even the analysts couldn’t believe.

One analyst with Jefferies & Co. specifically said: "They just demolished it."

After Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer disclosed a huge number of iCloud subscribers, CEO Tim Cook took the stage, so to speak, to give investors a piece of his mind on the whole shebang (via Daring Fireball):

“I think Peter shared earlier the number of customers that had signed up for iCloud, and it’s already over 85 million, so it’s incredible that this has happened in just a few months’ period of time. We’re thrilled with it, and the response from customers has been incredible. It’s solved a lot of problems that customers were having and made their lives much much easier…. It was a fundamental shift recognizing that people had numerous devices and they wanted the bulk of their content in the cloud and easily accessible from all of their devices, and you know, I think we’re seeing the response from that. With 85 million customers in just three months, it is a very very important part — it’s not just a product, it’s a strategy for the next decade.”

Apple pundit John Gruber, the author of the aforementioned blog, believes Wall Street will overlook these invaluable pieces of information coming from the mouth of Apple’s chief executive officer — “just like they did Apple’s digital hub strategy,” writes Gruber (referring to iTunes).

He also expects every new major product release from Apple to integrate with iCloud in one way or another.

In another statement issued yesterday, Cook said: “Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline.”