Yesterday’s announcement of Google Music seemed pretty sedate. I think being sandwiched between Amazon’s Cloud Storage announcement last month and the impending Apple cloud announcement is bad for Google. Don’t get me wrong. This is a good first step for Google but Music is basically not that much different than most music locker services. It requires you to upload your catalog (that would tie me a while since I have about 16 gigs of music), you can stream it to any device, and you can cache tracks on your devices for those long plane rides. They did add a “genius” mix feature but that’s not very exciting. So overall I think this will be great for existing Android users but not a killer feature that entices people to choose Android over iOS. I believe Apples offering will likely be simpler to use (I believe you won’t have to upload anything to get tracks into the cloud) and it will have all iTunes features with maybe some interesting extras. We will have to wait for that shoe to drop. It should be more than a music locker. Simpler is better and I believe that in the consumer space simpler trumps open for most users. Things are improving in the Android space, but they have a long way to go.