Creative destruction. Apple is at it again and this time the axe is falling on one of the company’s few failures. On Sunday, July 1, Cupertino officially closed MobileMe, their third failed attempt to create and deliver online services. Another less than successful service, iWork, will go dark on Tuesday, July 31.

Apple generally doesn’t release beta software or services to the public. iWork.com is rarer still because the online document collaboration, storage and sync service never left beta and will ignominiously die that way.

Looking for iWork.com public beta?
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.

See also: Phil Schiller introduce iWork.com at Macworld San Francisco 2009.

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.

Yes, iWork.com will be gone a week or two after OS X Mountain Lion ships. As you may know, Apple’s new Mac operating system provides seamless online document, photo and data sync and sharing — it (sort of) just works…

Ready to bid iWork.com goodbye?

via Macworld UK

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