Guest post by At MacWorld, Apple announced its new iWork.com beta, a Google-Docs-esque online collaboration application to work closely with the original iWork program to share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with others. When beta testing is over, it will be a paid service (though the monthly price as of yet hasn’t been released), much unlike Google Docs, which is free.
http://www.officelive.com/
Why are they going to charge money for a webservice everyone else is offering for free. I guess they want a piece of the webapp-market but that is not the way to get it.
The service doesn’t even allow online editing, so everybody who want to edit something needs iWorks to do it. While with google docs you can export your document to odf/rtf/pdf/doc OR edit it online.
So a worse service for more money! Too bad google doesn’t give you an option to buy your privacy + ad-less interface back, the only reason I see for not using there service in an corporation.
Edited 2009-01-08 14:02 UTC
Worse service for more money AND from Apple? There’s a big troll comment in my head but i don’t think the comment system could go that far negative.
Maybe it’s just my skewed perceptions, but I don’t think this is intended to be a competitor to Google Docs, at least not yet. Basically, it’s a way to share iWork documents on-line and collaborate, nothing more. Sort of an iWork cloud, if you will. It doesn’t seem that on-line editing was even a design goal, nor was it intended to be a web application as google docs is.
That being said, I do think charging for something like that is ridiculous. I really do like a lot of Apple’s product line, but some of their business ideas leave me shaking my head. This is one of those, I really don’t know how far they’re going to get with this, and I can’t really see most people or businesses paying for it. But, time and money will tell, I suppose.