<p>Tim Cook laid a little-remarked bombshell on Microsoft at Apple's event today.</p><p>Apple's CEO announced that iWork, the company's suite of productivity software (word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations) "now consists of the best-selling mobile productivity apps on any platform." That's not so remarkable: Microsoft has allowed its Office suite, which is near-ubiquitous on PCs, to fall far behind on mobile by not releasing versions of it for iOS and Android devices until this summer. But then Cook revealed that from now on, anyone who buys a new iPhone or iPad will get iWork for free. It used to cost $30 in the United States.</p><p>On the surface, this might seem simply like a ploy to get people to buy more iDevices. And in part it is: Apple makes the vast majority of its money from hardware, not software. But it also looks like part of a wider plan to challenge Microsoft Office head-on.</p><p>Up to now, Office's strength has been its ubiquity. It has long been available on Macs as well as Windows machines. But this summer, Apple finally brought iWork to Windows, in a sense, by launching a beta version of iWork in the cloud. Any PC user can run it, for free, through a web browser. As 9to5mac pointed out at the time, this suggested that Apple might soon cut the price of iWork in its other incarnations to zero, because charging for it while offering a free version through the web made no sense.</p><p><a href="http://qz.com/122834/by-making-iwork-free-on-ios-apple-could-pummel-microsoft-office/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/83784">Goodbye Microsoft Office, Hello iWork</a> (Network World)</p><p><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/09/10/free-iwork-apples-jab-at-microsoft/">Free iWork: Apple's Jab at Microsoft</a> (Wall Street Journal (blog))</p><p><a href="http://allthingsd.com/20130910/apple-to-offer-iwork-apps-for-free-with-new-ios-devices/">Apple to Offer iWork Apps for Free With New iOS Devices</a> (AllThingsD)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dYckJlnPtrhy1LMClUKW6V8_V1YrM&ned=us">148 additional articles.</a></p>