Slashdot Mirror
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.
Makes sense as they are a consumer brand and not targeting the workplace.
...where your important business data is as misty amd vaporous as its namesake. very eponymous if you ask me, and just as likely to evaporate.
Silence is a state of mime.
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.
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.
I think their overall strategy is to move away from the filesystem model since the iPad doesn't expose it to you at all for simplicity, etc. Retiring a service like this makes sense if you keep that in mind.
Doesn't make me want to use it, but that's not the only reason :P