Apple shutting down iWork.com

Apple has sent out an e-mail to all its iWork.com beta registered users that they are planning to discontinue the service from July 31. As reported by MacRumors, this news comes as Apple is gearing towards mass adaptation of their new iCloud service and hence it’s urging its users to make the shift to iCloud as well to sync all their work data.

Going..going..gone

For those not in the know, the company had announced iWork.com in the month of January, way back in 2009. It was launched as a free beta with Apple eventually giving the service at a fee. This service stayed in beta throughout its tenure and now with their new iCloud service, they’ve figured the best option is to shut iWork.com entirely. It’s important to note that iCloud comes with a host of new features, but there’s still not the same amount of detailing and tools that iWork.com had.

The e-mail sent out to the users read:

“Dear iWork.com user,

Thanks for participating in the iWork.com public beta.

Last year, we launched iCloud, a service that stores your music, photos, documents, and more and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices. Today, there are already over 40 million documents stored on iCloud by millions of iWork customers. Learn more about iCloud.

With a new way to share iWork documents between your devices using iCloud, the iWork.com public beta service will no longer be available. As of July 31, 2012, you will no longer be able to access your documents on the iWork.com site or view them on the web.

We recommend that you sign in to iWork.com before July 31, 2012, and download all your documents to your computer. For detailed instructions on how to save a copy of your documents on your computer, read this support article at Apple.com.

Sincerely,

The iWork team”

This news comes after Apple pulled the shutter on MobileMe as well and now they’re urging users to make the migration. Other features such as iDisk, Gallery and iWeb will also not be available from June 30 onwards. Like always, the end of something conjoins the start of something new.