Charles on… anything that comes along

Over at MacDailyNews there a report that IGG Software, which has - had - a product (for the Mac) called “iWork” has changed the name to “iBiz”.

Which gets all but one obstacle out of the way to a launch. Yes, what about iWork.com? The whois record gives:

Domain Name: IWORK.COM

Created on: 22-Aug-95

Expires on: 21-Aug-07

Last Updated on: 15-Nov-04

Administrative Contact:

yucca@att.net

iwork.com

Chris Cha P.O. Box 750565 Forest Hills, NY 11375

Note the long expiry date, and early registration. We’ll see. But it seems to me that we’re going to see something work-y next week. (Though if it includes Appleworks, I’m staying away from it.)

Update Tues 1030: I emailed Ian Gillespie, who is in charge at IGG Software, asking why the change of name. His reply: We feel that the new name better reflects the direction in which we see our product going, towards business management and not just time-billing. It was a difficult choice to make, but we feel that the transition will be smooth and we look forward to improving iBiz.

Which to me neatly sidesteps the question of why change it now. (Some of the links on the website were still showing “iWork” last night.) He hasn’t replied so far to a query about why now, and whether a Cupertino-based company in any way helped the decision. (Further update 1100: MacRumors has this down. Apple has sweetened IGG to hand over the iWork name, no doubt for some nice folding stuff, as IGG had registered for the trademark first.)

And what could iWork contain? Certainly Keynote. Something for documents. But I wonder whether Apple would really step on Microsoft’s toes on this one. It would need a spreadsheet from scratch - which could only be a poor Excel copy. Then again, Appleworks has that. Perhaps it is a ground-up rewrite of that suite, with some more thrown in. Aimed at the punter who can’t afford MS Office (as not many people can, if it’s their own money they’re spending).

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Apple sues Think Secret over headless iMac and iWork: yeah, but try finding them (5 January 2005; score: 93.58%)
• Mail 2.1: could we have some better IMAP, please? Because 33 crashes in 6 hours is too much. (15 October 2007; score: 49.94%)
• These things I found interesting.. 8 September 2005 (evening) (8 September 2005; score: 45.82%)