Another Death in the Cloud As Apple Kills Off iWork

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.

Comments

Is this really a "death"?

[MrEricSir]

Seems like they're just moving their online document storage service from iWork.com to iCloud. It's not like iDrive, where they killed it and offered no replacement.

Re:Is this really a "death"?

[MickyTheIdiot]

Except that they are retiring "real" cloud storage like iDisk and only allowing documents... going in the exact opposite direction of Google which moved from only allowing Google Office documents to allowing real cloud storage of all types of files.

It's a weird direction they are going... by getting rid of iDisk they are doing the exact opposite of Google, dropbox, and everyone else.

iWork migrated to iCloud

[enterix]

iWork.com was always in Beta. Documents sharing services were incorporated into iCloud thus making iWorks.com redundant.

Why it's always wise to have multiple copies

[JonathanCombe]

Just as it's not a good idea to have a single copy of your files on a single disk it's not a good idea to have a single copy of your data in "the cloud" either. Cloud storage is useful, especially when using multiple computers but it's not a substitute for local storage and backups (but does make a good off-site backup). But you have to be prepared to switch storage providers and go through all the hassle of uploading your data again if you rely on someone else to store it. If it comes to that at least having a local copy of your files means you don't have to download them first before you can upload them again.

What makes less sense is the file system

[SuperKendall]

but what the heck are they going to replace it with?

You go into an app, and see the list of documents that go with that app.

Or you receive a type of document in email (or by a dropbox app) and select an application that can open a document of that type.

The file system is horribly, horribly confusing to non-technical people. If you really want to bring computing to the masses, the file system must go. I'm not sure if what Apple is doing is the best approach but the computer industry HAS to try something else.