Apple isn't playing catchup. Documents in a web browser wasn't their business. But with all the attacks of Google against Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and others, where they clearly do things just to interfere with potential competitors in the advertising market without any intent of making money, Apple has started to strike back. No money to Google anymore for search (welcome, Bing!). No money to Google anymore for maps. Fragment the online application market with iWork for iCloud.
Although i agree that iWork in the cloud was not apples business, i don't agree with "they strike back".
It is more a situation like "How does it make sense for our customers".
See working with google docs on ipad is not fun at all, regardless of all the other shortcomings of google docs (by the way it is interesting if you read something like "Microsoft office can do much more and in the next sentence u read use google docs which can't do all the stuff either)
For apple customers it means
buy iworks for a relative cheap price (or only part of it),
you can use it on your mac, you can use it on your phone or tablet with sync thanks to icloud. And hey if you are at a location where you don't have access to your devices, you can modify it also on the browser.
So for apple it is a logical extension of their services for the customer. And thats everything i think is behind it. Because google docs to microsoft and back is already extremely annoying and bad. Adding another step is much worse.
Now you have one toolchain you can use. I like that really, because it saves much time and effort.
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sorry if apple wants the desktop app to be a real alternative to office, libreoffice and google docs its gonna be playing catchup. note they havent improved it much in years which i believe is the opposite of what you want to do when you are entering a new market.
if it wants its online iworks to be a real alternative to google docs its gonna be playing catchup.
dont see any real problems with iworks where they need to catchup.
Office is bloated with 90% features less than 10% of the users really use.
Libreoffice and openoffice are just free versions of office.
With worse usability but they are just cheap as in free.
Pages/Numbers/Keynote is not office, it is reduced to what most people need.
Adding useless features is simple, everyone can write features regardless how useless they are. And that leads to software like office ... thousands of useless features, some basic features not working as good as they can and some features for experts that are really worth the money.
The best thing apple can do is make the basic features perfect.
Because experts whcih do need expert features will use office, regardless of the price or system. And all other users have a affordable and better usable alternative.
Don't know why apple should change this. Truth is, if Apple would bloat iWorks, it would not longer worth the money. Because you can't make it work like office, so you can't replace office with it if you need the features.
So go apple go, you are doing it right. But i am sure apple knows that
