Posted by Greg Mills

Sever farm vs server farm, Apple vs Amazon, iCloud vs “Amazon Cloud Player”. The big internet service companies are competing for what is expected to be an enormous amount of money. On line services where you can buy and download digital content is expected to be worth $US13 Billion to Apple alone by next year according to Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowhry.

Amazon has recently sweetened its offering to keep customers from migrating to Apple’s iCloud. No mystery remains as to what Apple intends to do with the giant server farms it is building in Maiden, NC. Apple is also putting another half million square foot server farm together in Santa Clara, CA.

All of this underlines the obvious, Apple intends to own the digital download business of all kinds, just as they do music through the iTunes store already.

One interesting note, Trip Chowhry says that publishers prefer the ePub book format more than the Amazon Kindle format. The most recent version of Apple’s “Pages” word processor prints to ePub for uploading to electronic Book stores. See Apple support for that feature at: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4168