Another Death in the Cloud As Apple Kills Off iWork 134
Posted
by
timothy
from the ways-of-knowing dept.
from the ways-of-knowing dept.
Google is retiring the iGoogle page, but on a much shorter time scale, Apple is shutting down an iService of its own: the cloud-storage site iWork.com (linked to Apple's office apps suite iWork) is slated to go offline at the end of this month. Says the article, over at SlashCloud: "As of that date, 'you will no longer be able to access your documents on the iWork.com site or view them on the Web,' reads Apple’s note on the matter, followed by a recommendation that anyone with documents on iWork download them to the desktop." Both of these announcements remind me why I covet local storage for documents and the ability to set my own GUI prefs.
The Cloud and streaming (Score:5, Interesting)
I got in an argument with essentially my whole class by saying that we never going to fully get rid of system in the home and probably at work. Everyone was "Keep the data in the cloud, we can stream anything all the time, all I need is my smartphone." They brushed off my security arguments, the fact that communications can go down, and you're really going to compose spreadsheets and reports on your smartphone? It was an MBA class, by the way.
Is this really an issue? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, Apple abandoning iWork is the fundamental equivalent of dropping floppy drives.
If new computers are not going to use floppy drives then you will have to transfer them to a different storage medium if you want to access the content after the fact.
Dropping an iService is equivalent to moving your content to another form of storage, whether its physical or virtual.
What would be "nice" is for Apple to provide some kind of utility or tool to make conversion easier. iWork.com should now have a button on it to zip up and download one large file of all your content rather then having to manually move individual files to your desktop. Of, zip it up and move it to Apple's new cloud storage, or convert to new Numbers/Pages/Keynote files stored in the cloud, etc. There are about a dozen ways Apple could make this easier for people rather then just cutting the power a month from now.
Its good for old services that are not used to die and allow companies to focus on providing better services people actually use. The opposite is Windows which supports every freaking hardware and software standard on the planet even if only .1% of the people use any of it. I am sure there is still code buried deep in the Windows kernel to support 8" floppy drives.
In the long run, everybody hates change, but they always seem to love the results.
Re:Apple products don't work (Score:5, Interesting)
Why did this get marked down? Has nobody been watching since Cook took the big chair? Turning FCP into iMovie pro, dragging ass when it comes to updating the pro line (and when they did it was still behind the curve BAD), killing the server line, its pretty damned obvious that while Jobs liked the idea that "The movies are made on Apple products" that Cook? He really don't give a shit.
Mark my words within 2 years the pro line will be quietly canned, probably with some press release stating the iPad is the new Pro tool or some such BS, and the line will be trimmed down to maybe 2 Macbooks and a couple of iMacs and that's it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Cook exits X86 altogether, its just not nearly as high margin as mobile and its controlled by Intel and NOT Apple which has never set well with Apple.
Frankly when Intel slit Nvidia's throat on the chipset business i figured it was the beginning of the end for Apple X86, Apple and Nvidia had a nice relationship and Intel just killing it like that couldn't have made any friends at Cupertino. Then you look into Cook's past, how he likes to lock parts up with multiyear contracts so they know what is coming when and how much and having their X86 line dictated by Intel must not sit nice with them. They should have went with AMD where they would have had more pull but seeing what Apple has been doing in the pro line I have a feeling Cook will just wash his hands of X86 completely instead.