Ever since the conference by Apple’s WWDC (World-Wide Developer’s conference) there has been a huge media coverage surrounding it. Apple’s iCloud has focussed on consumer-centric entertainment storage and access features. But clearly, it also represents potentially path-breaking possibilities for business users and business services as well.

Firstly, let us have a look at the competitors.

BlackBerry was the market leader in Smartphones for a long time. But like typical firms, it got complacent, and had no major innovation/feature added to it, since the revolutionary BlackBerry Messenger or the BBM as it is affectionately know. Its sole competitive advantage seems to be lost with the introduction of iMessage for the Apple users. Microsoft tried its best by securing a partnership with Nokia, but if current sales figures are anything to go by, Nokia is on a free-fall in the Smartphone market with no innovations in hardware or software.

The only real competition iOS does have is in the form of Android. However, one important point is, while Android is the most sold OS today; it is done through a large number of handset manufacturers. On the other hand, iOS5 enjoys the privilege of being proprietary with Apple products only, which leads to better integration and hence, a better user-experience.

It has been widely acknowledged by most Android fans, or Fandroids, as they are known, that most of the features of iOS5 are copied or inspired from the Android OS. Then, what is it that Apple does right? Apple is the biggest brand in the world. And it has reached there through effective marketing. And this is exactly what Apple has done right with iOS. It treats phones as a tool to be used by everyone and not as a toy to be played around and tweaked with, as is the case with Android. Apple takes an idea, redesigns it, and refines the entire user-experience thus making it very intuitive and user-friendly. This results in them being leader in the Smartphone category.

We talked about iMessage taking away the competitive advantage of BlackBerry. What it also will effectively do is take away a huge stream of revenue from the Telecom Service Providers. SMS & MMS have been the cash cows for them since time immemorial, and now with the iMessage which effectively acts as a SMS & MMS tool, only difference being, it uses a data connection, there will be hardly any requirement by the customer to go for the heftily charged SMS plans, and instead they can use their existing data (2G or 3G or 4G) plans for the same at practically no extra cost.

There’s another chunk of industry which will be widely affected by the newly-announced features of the iOS5 viz. the developers of applications (apps) for the iOS. The features like ‘sync’ have made apps such as “DropBox’ redundant. However, some of the app developers have taken it in a positive manner. They insist, that Apple will be providing the users with only a basic-level integrate app. However, to extract the full functionality they’ll have to use the third-party app, and now their job of marketing it would become easier because of existence of a similar service. At the same time, there are some developers who are not too excited with the announcement of the iOS5 as it would mean that they would have to develop upgrades to their already existing apps so as to support them with the newer OS. Also, others are already starting to look at developing apps for other platforms like Android which offer far more flexibility.

Lastly, the seeming winner of new developments at Apple is ‘Twitter’. It has been deeply integrated with the iOS5 thus pretty much making it the default Social Network for all Apple devices. Many see this as an answer to FaceBook’s growing popularity and that being a looming threat to Apple, even though it is an indirect threat for now.

Whatever the end result may be, Apple’s WWDC has created huge media hype as it does every single year, and has invited endless debates about the same.