iWork.com

Apple's office suite iWork has been available on the iPad tablet since its launch last year, but the iPhone owners still had to look for third-party applications to work with their office documents (the most popular office suites for iPhone are Quickoffice and Office²). And in less than two years Apple has adapted its mobile iWork to iPhone's small screen. Traditionally, iWork includes the word processor Pages, the spreadsheets tool Numbers and the presentations app KeyNote. As usual Apple is not trying to expand to the "other" world and compete globally with MS Office and Google Docs. Instead, Apple is trying again to make more money on it's fan-base: each of the 3 mobile iWork apps costs $9.99. In addition, the mobile iWork will only work on the latest models iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 (i.e. Apple encourages users to buy the new models). Also, for now the iWork for iPhone can't work with the online office service iWork.com, but it is expected that this feature will be added in a couple of weeks.

Today Steve Jobs introduced iPad - the device that he called the most important thing in his life. And from our side it would be wrong to ignore this event, especially taking into account, that the previous thing (iPhone) now has the significant impact on the mobile business-apps market. While we must admit that iPad - is a very convenient thing for home use and it will make a revolution in e-publishing, but we do not believe that iPad (or other device of such clipboard design) will replace communicators and netbooks from the enterprise environment. We were able to come up with only 5 reasons that can make this $500 device useful for your business:

A year ago, Apple launched iWork.com, the service that enables online sharing of iWork documents. However, all that it can - is publishing documents to your online account and inviting colleagues to view them online and post comments. Now it seems that Apple has decided to create a full-fledged alternative to Google Docs and MS Office Web Applications. The fact is that the iWork team has recently opened the vacancy for RIA (rich internet applications) developers, having Javascript skills. It's also interesting that according to DHH from 37Signals, Apple has spammed their development team with this proposal. Creating its own online office suite seems quite logical for Apple. First, the relations with Google are recently getting cold and Apple has no desire to push Google Apps to its customers. Secondly, according to rumors, the Apple Tablet, designed to work with web-applications, will appear soon. And it's clear that this device will need an office suite.