Apple is the most successful technology company in the world, and many businesses rely on the iPhone, iPad or both in order to keep everything going even whilst on the go.

This is thanks not only to the ubiquity of the iPhone as a high-end smartphone but also to the work of effective service providers who help to connect it to more conventional business hardware and software.

However, whilst there is a rudimentary suite of software on iOS, anyone who uses an iPad for serious office work will still rely on Microsoft Office: the same software everyone else uses on conventional computers.

This is not for a lack of trying; on multiple occasions, Apple has tried to make a successful suite of business software and on all three occasions it failed dramatically.

The first was the Apple III, a successor to the highly successful Apple II computer which was designed for business use with high-end components and a design intended to be completely silent.

The problem was it was so badly designed that the chips would overheat and pop out of the motherboard, leading to the rather infamous official technical support suggestion to pick it up six inches off of the desk and drop it.

Despite eventually becoming a capable business machine after some revisions that made it work, it was a complete disaster and may have thwarted any attempts for Apple to try again.

Regardless, they did have another attempt with the Apple Lisa, the first mass-produced computer with a graphical user interface. It was very ahead of its time, but it cost so much and had such limited business software support that only NASA ever used it for business purposes.

Finally, after the Apple Macintosh succeeded where the Lisa failed, an attempt to make an office suite for it was a massive failure in no small part due to a terrible advertising campaign where they called their potential customers lemmings.