iWork.com Inaccessible After July
There’s nothing wrong with Documents in the Cloud, as long as you see it as a virtual syncing cable and not as a collaborative work tool. iWork.com, weak as it was, at least tried to provide collaboration features in the form of Web-based manual file sharing, comments on shared iWork documents, and an ongoing chat-style discussion. Documents in the Cloud offers none of those features.
iWork.com had been in public beta for more than three years. It was pretty clear that Apple didn’t care about it and perhaps never knew what to do with it. Apple’s new model seems to be that a document is edited by one user in one app on multiple devices. It’s sort of pretending that workflows involving multiple apps or users editing the same document don’t exist.
It’s a shame that, as with the MobileMe Photo Gallery and Web hosting, Apple is setting an arbitrary deadline, not too far in the future, after which they will delete lots of user data that may not exist anywhere else. What if you’re away or don’t get the e-mail? And why make all the users migrate their data manually; why can’t Apple automatically transfer the documents to iCloud?
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I'm not sure they are ignoring multiple users. But they haven't introduced a solution yet although the parts are coming into place. I think it's much more a gradual rollout where they want to get what they have working before adding more parts. While that's pretty frustrating (primarily due to the amount ot time to get a finished solution) I can respect the strategy.
The cloud isn't Apple's strength. It's Google's (more or less - their recent initiatives have all fallen flat). I think Apple already sees a lot of strains with their networked initiatives like Siri, iTunes Match, and the limited version of iCloud they have out. It's clear with the preview of Mountain Lion that they intend to only add slowly to it so they don't get ahead of themselves. Ditto for why Siri isn't on more devices.
[...] no iWork for Windows, and iWork.com was read-only and (like iDisk) will be shut down. Apple just doesn’t seem interested in serving customers who want to collaborate or use other [...]
[...] I like the idea in theory. But trust your photos to the company that shut down MobileMe Photo Gallery? [...]
