With Microsoft’s Office 2010 suite planning to ephemerally transmutate into the digital cloud, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Apple is intending to make the same transition with their iWork suite.
In point of fact, iWork is already partially in the cloud: iWork 2009 introduced the ability for users to upload and comment on documents onto a website. It’s a natural move for Apple to want to extend that capability, as increased pressure is put upon purely native office applications by the likes of Google’s online productivity applications.
No surprise, then, that Apple seems to be readying a future version of iWork to integrate more dramatically with the cloud. According to a recent job posting, Apple’s iWork division is looking for an “energetic, highly motivated software engineer” to help them both design and develop a “scalable rich internet application.” Expertise called for is Javascript development, experience developing scalable rich internet applications and experience developing presentation, collaboration or word processing projects.
That certainly looks like iWork in the cloud, doesn’t it? Moreover, the wording suggests that Apple isn’t just looking to supplement an existing team’s developer staff, but put together a whole new one. That likely puts any new, cloud-based version of the iWork suite a couple years away, but it is a tantalizing hint on what we can expect in the future from Apple’s most ignored office suite package.
