I agree to a large extent. MS is maybe the other extreme, Office unfortunately has "feature creep" in my view and once people finally "got" Office, MS redesigned the UI in Office 2007. Most users only use a fraction of its features.
Apple on other hand with no updates for four years and no roadmap is much worse in the Office space.
There is need for "middle ground", especially in education: A simpler and cheaper Office than MS Office, maybe extensible with plug-ins and web access/online collaboration. iWork could have been this solution.
One example for lack of strategy (or interest ?) is the discontinued iwork.com (for people who don't remember the online portions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWork.com ). Although the Beta had many flaws, more and more people work in teams in separate locations, better collaboration features are needed for iWork in the future.
How come the OS (OS X 10.9 probably out this year) is updated much more frequently than Mac HW and SW: Mac Pros and software like iWork not updated for four years ?!
I don't think a middle-ground solution is what we really need.
Microsoft Office is fully-featured; yet, it's simple and intuitive. Anyone can write on Word, or create a presentation with PowerPoint. Taking out some features of Microsoft Office won't make it simpler. And Microsoft Office is not really expensive, especially for students and home users.
People often complain that Microsoft Office is bloated and confusing due to the number of features. Well, Microsoft Word 2013 will consume about 50 MB of RAM, and it won't even reach 100 MB, even if I open some very complex documents. Menus are simple and intuitive and easy to be found.
Mac users, however, may complain about Microsoft Office for a reason. The Mac version of Office is slow, memory-consuming and not half as intuitive as the Windows version. Microsoft put a lot of time, money and effort on Office for Windows, but not on Office for Mac. Perhaps that's why people keep saying that Office is bloated and all, but that applies to Office for Mac. Office for Windows is much, much better. This is certainly Microsoft's fault, but it's Apple's fault too. It's Apple's fault because Apple doesn't provide a decent alternative that could threaten Microsoft Office.
In the Windows world, Microsoft has the best Office available for some reasons: it wants to push its own operating system, and it had some pretty good competitors, such as Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3, and it managed to kill them all. But in the Mac world, which office suite competes with Microsoft Office? Apple doesn't give a damn about iWork. iWork is for dummies, for beginners, not for serious, real work. LibreOffice? Well, it's a cheap copy of Microsoft Office. It is a pretty good office suite, especially for free, but it doesn't have the refinement and the level of investment to keep up to Microsoft Office.
Hey, Apple, why don't you spend one or two billion dollars per year in the development of iWork? There is cash enough for it. Microsoft puts hundreds of million dollars per year (perhaps even over a billion now) on Microsoft Office, and that's the reason why it's so good. How much does Apple invest on iWork? Close to nothing, I guess.