Amid all the cloud app buzz, Apple has actually taken a step back from the online application world. It plans to shutter the popular cloud-based iWork.com, which has been in existence since 2009. Why is Apple pulling the plug and what’s Apple’s idea of cloud really all about? Let’s take a look …

First up, if you’re wondering what iWork.com is all about, it’s similar to many other online productivity suites including Microsoft Office 365, Zoho and Google Docs. The difference is, it’s Apple. Hooray. But Apple has posted a notice on the iWork.com homepage, informing users that the three-year-old beta will never be anything more than a beta, because come July 31, 2012, users can kiss iWork.com and any documents you’ve left floating up there goodbye. If you don’t have local copies, now would be a good time to download and back them up.

So why is Apple pulling the plug on something like this? Despite some clear love for the product, Apple believes iCloud is the way to go, and thus, iWork.com is somewhat redundant. According to Apple’s official announcement:

So what does that mean for the rest of us? It’s a bit telling about Apple’s strategy: a device-based ecosystem connected through an invisible cloud. For Apple, iCloud represents the future — perhaps the glue — that holds your information together, while iWork.com represented a Web 2.0 world of cloud-based applications. While many companies clamor to provide hosted services  through browser portals and online web applications, Apple wants a cloud that works for you, not a cloud for you to work in. It could be important to think about that dichotomy when focusing on buying, selling or hosting any kind of cloud solution.