Has Apple left it too late to be a leader in cloud storage?

At WWDC, among a litany of other announcements, Apple unleashed iCloud Drive, representing further entry from Cupertino into the cloud storage space. But is it too little, too late?

Sitting as part of iOS 8, Apple is offering up to 5 gigabytes of free storage, with users being charged a princely 59p a month for up to 20GB and £2.40 a month for 200GB. This certainly compares favourably with Microsoft’s OneDrive – £5 per month for 200GB – and niche players such as Box and Dropbox, with prices similar to Google Drive and Amazon Web Services.

But the question remains: with so many players in the market, why Apple? And why now?

With iCloud Drive, Apple in theory has the missing piece of the jigsaw for the full enterprise collaboration suite that Google and Microsoft already has. Yet some of the tech press remains resolutely unconvinced about this move.

In …