Before he passed away, Steve Jobs made his final goal clear: make Apple the backbone of the consumer cloud:

The list of Mountain Lion’s features shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. But in its totality, it offers fascinating insight into Apple’s view of the future, one where all content, connections and experiences aren’t tethered to websites, but to the cloud – the cloud as defined by OS X.

Apple’s upcoming OS gives us a window to the Internet and other services using the cloud, but now our Apple devices will automatically know who we are, who our friends are, the content we care about and all the apps we use. With your reminders, contacts and photos automatically synced between each of your devices, you’ll never feel the Internet.

And you won’t miss it.

In other words, many of the reasons we love Facebook will be baked into all of our online devices, but that content won’t be controlled by Facebook. It will be controlled by Apple.

Microsoft has most of the desktop market, but its mobile footprint rounds to zero.

Facebook may have nearly a billion users, but it is just a website/application at the mercy of the operating system.

Google has significant mobile footprint and an expanding social strategy, but no desktop footprint other than Chrome and its cloud services.

Only Apple has desktop, mobile, and access to social.

Twitter. It makes sense for them to continue a deep and integrated partnership, with them and Sina Weibo.

As long as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple compete with only the smallest of collaborations, services like Netflix, Dropbox, Facebook, Skype will thrive. Nobody wants 100% lock-in.

So it's only when Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple start collaborating that we should get nervous?

With Hollywood, too. What's an iPod or iPad without great content? It's a symbiotic relationship. I'd bet many folks primarily want smartphones just for the social networking via twitter/FB/Instagram -- how can Apple/GOOG/MSFT/Amazon compete with that? (Or why would they want to).

This article (written back in Feb) turned out to be wrong: Apple and Facebook have deepened their collaboration (iPhoto for example shares to FB seamlessly) and iOS as well.

Also, if you accept his hypothesis, I wouldn't discount Google's position in this: Chrome is a much more significant desktop presence than Apple's, and their cloud services (albeit with the clunky Google UI) and mobile presence is not paralleled by anyone. But I agree they don't have social.

Good points. Apple phased out Ping and Facebook is integrated into the OS now. Rather than replace Facebook, Apple has embraced and extended them.

Google is perhaps best situated, but it's all in an effort to get us to search more. By comparison, Apple just wants us to keep buying new devices. Not sure what Microsoft and Facebook want from us.