Apple's iWork Selling Well

[Superdrive]

I'll get iWork when they include it with a word processor. At least with Word, it feels Mac-like (unbelievable), and I can type/print a reasonable looking page without spending ten minutes trying to figure out how to format the thing. Unfortunately, TextEdit is more of a word processor than Pages.

 

[dcranston]

iWork is NOT Office

Has it occured to anyone that Apple is not trying to *compete* with Office, but rather provide a better option for home use than Office is? Perhaps it's the opposite of "office": "home". It seems that iWork is designed just as the name would imply: a really awesome set of tools to help people be creative and do some of the things they need to do in a very beautiful and professional-looking way.

You see, to me Excel has always been the odd one out. Spreadsheet? In the '80s when people still had Slides and MacWrite, was every home user calling out to get their hands on a copy of CricketGraph? It seems that Excel can be a useful tool for home users, but it's largely more useful in a business setting. Quite honestly, a paired-down version of Filemaker would be much more useful for a home user than a spreadsheet application would, to help keep track of things -- books, movies, etc.. although maybe custom apps (Delicious Monster?) fill this role better anyway.

I just think dismissing this suite because it doesn't compete app-for-app with Office is a ridiculous concept. In fact, comparing this suite to Office is kind of funny when you think about it, although Apple has certainly led you in that direction by bundling a presentation and page layout/word processing program together. But the fact is, these apps are part of where Apple's core strengths lie: graphics & design. Apple loves media. Excel is anything but media. It seems everyone is so focused on Apple releasing a spreadsheet application purely because Microsoft has one and everyone wants Apple to "take over" Microsoft's dominance.

Fact is, that's not going to happen. So Apple focuses on what they can improve. And that's by providing stellar graphics and media integration. I think Pages and Keynote are fine examples of the Apple way of doing things. Apple Spreadsheet is remaking for the sake of remaking -- not exactly Apple's style.

My 2 cents...

 

[bigandy]

Seriously... um, what's in it again? I love Apple, but the only thing I really like about Microsoft is in this area: Microsoft Office for Mac. Now for for Windows.... that's a different story.
Oh, and no offense to iWorks people. I just seriously don't have much if an understanding of it past Pages, and a very basic understanding at that.

but this is good. good for microsoft office as well as iWork. iWork has to improve to match and hopefully better office, and microsoft will take notice and respond with a better product. office is ok, but it's not perfect, on either platform. that's the only way microsoft function, they won't try and improve a product if there isn't a big competitor chowing down on their marketshare. ok, they might not actually improve it much, or even manage to make it worse (windows me ), but they will respond.

 

[gekko513]

Interesting to note that the Mac "Office Suite" holds 13.4% of the total "Office Suite" market.

 

[gauchogolfer]

It takes some getting used to...

I'll get iWork when they include it with a word processor. At least with Word, it feels Mac-like (unbelievable), and I can type/print a reasonable looking page without spending ten minutes trying to figure out how to format the thing. Unfortunately, TextEdit is more of a word processor than Pages.

I started out in the same boat as you, I believe, when I made the switch to my Powerbook in May 2005. My main reason to buy a notebook was to write my dissertation without being tied to my desk, and since I've always been interested in Macs (since leaving them behind with my Performa ) I decided to take the plunge. Of course, for writing a dissertation, Word is awful (try getting 200+ pages with graphics, equations, references, etc. to behave in Word...) so I wrote it in LaTeX (using TeXShop, a great program btw). I got iWork when it came time to put together a new round of presentations for the conferences, and I wanted Keynote for this. Pages was just kind of a throw-in for me. The interface for both Keynote and Pages was sufficiently different from PPT and Word that it made for some frustrating times, but I felt that Keynote was worth the effort; Pages, not so much.
Now that I'm out of school, I decided to try and use Pages more, and just upgraded to Pages 2. I'm using it for things like research papers, notes, reports to other people in our group, and after using it more and more, I have come to like it. Yes, formatting is different than Word, but sufficiently like Keynote (using the Inspector for everything) that it's comfortable now. The ability to place images where I want them on the page (and have them stay there) is perhaps its biggest asset. IMO, this makes "layout" and "formatting" much better than in Word.

Sorry for the long-winded answer, but I hope more and more people will use Pages, not just to provide an alternative to Word, but because there is real value there, if you take the time to learn.

 

[Hattig]

That may be so, but it's quite a bit faster than Keynote and Pages. Speaking of which, has Apple improved the speed in the most recent release of these programs? I would consider upgrading from iWork '05 if they had...

I've found the opposite, NeoOffice is way to slow compared to iWork ('05). If I wan't to do something quickly, iWork is up and ready in a second, but NeoOffice takes ages to be in a ready state.

 

[bugfaceuk]

Compared to MS Word, OpenOffice is just clunky and sucks.
Compared to WordPerfect, MS Word is just clunky and sucks.
I just sent an email to Corel telling them if they will re-release WordPerfect for Tiger and include ODF support, I will buy it.

Just an interested question here, have you (or anyone else) tried Open Office 2.0 on the Mac. Certainly on my Windows PC it was a big improvement in the "clunkyness" stakes, but my Windows PC is fast enough that any slow application seems OK (wrt office productivity tools)

 

[Project]

Has it occured to anyone that Apple is not trying to *compete* with Office, but rather provide a better option for home use than Office is? Perhaps it's the opposite of "office": "home". It seems that iWork is designed just as the name would imply: a really awesome set of tools to help people be creative and do some of the things they need to do in a very beautiful and professional-looking way.

My 2 cents...

Somebody needs to quote this man every time this conversation pops up.

Quite simply, I find iWork to be a brilliant product. Keynote is superior to Powerpoint. Pages is superior to Word, for MY use, the home user. I dont need a spreadsheet for what its true purpose is, or for the extensive abilities that Excel provides, but people think they do. I remember reading not so long ago (maybe it was Wil Shipley) that Omnigroup found that most people use Excel just to create lists of things, or create a budget etc. So they created Omnioutliner to dutifully do these kind of tasks much better than a spreadsheet ever could. And you know what? Theyre right.

Now ive just started playing with Pages 2, and the integrated spreadsheet capabilities is more than enough for what id guess to be 80% of people. Sure it isnt a solution for scientists, or the financial department of a business, but this clearly isnt who Apple is targeting their product at. Office is too entrenched in this market to make any inroads without making a serious investment and thus losing Microsoft as a partner anyway. Clearly, Apples intention is to skim the home market.

I honestly think they should include iWork on every new Mac. Get people using it. They will soon realise what a nice bit of software it is. And as I recall AppleWork isnt being included with Intel machines, now is the time to start bundling it. Then make them pay for the upgrade 12 months later if they want to, like iLife.

 

[bugfaceuk]

Has it occured to anyone that Apple is not trying to *compete* with Office, but rather provide a better option for home use than Office is? Perhaps it's the opposite of "office": "home". It seems that iWork is designed just as the name would imply: a really awesome set of tools to help people be creative and do some of the things they need to do in a very beautiful and professional-looking way.

...

I just think dismissing this suite because it doesn't compete app-for-app with Office is a ridiculous concept. In fact, comparing this suite to Office is kind of funny when you think about it, although Apple has certainly led you in that direction by bundling a presentation and page layout/word processing program together. But the fact is, these apps are part of where Apple's core strengths lie: graphics & design. Apple loves media. Excel is anything but media. It seems everyone is so focused on Apple releasing a spreadsheet application purely because Microsoft has one and everyone wants Apple to "take over" Microsoft's dominance.

Fact is, that's not going to happen. So Apple focuses on what they can improve. And that's by providing stellar graphics and media integration. I think Pages and Keynote are fine examples of the Apple way of doing things. Apple Spreadsheet is remaking for the sake of remaking -- not exactly Apple's style.

My 2 cents...

And a good 2 cents it is, I don't think are trying to compete with office at all other than in the "Office Productivity Suite" stakes. That does not mean "App for App" but as usual Apple are asking "What can we do well"? IMHO it's this slow burn "do what we do well" stratgegy that has seen Apple back into fiscal and market strength.

I think that the provision of "enough Numbers to meet needs" is a good thing. If it grows into an application because it becomes strong and distinct enough to do so, that's great. The filemaker position is an interesting one, and I guess I almost would expect that to be somehow integrated with a .Mac offering (perhaps allowing more dynamic web-pages). Although I must admit that doesn't seem to integrate well with Apple's current paring of .Mac+iLife. However, I don't see any compeling reason for the application integration to stop at iLife.

Just my 50th of a buck.

 

[Bern]

Has it occured to anyone that Apple is not trying to *compete* with Office, ....
My 2 cents...

Well said, I couldn't agree more.

 

[akhomerun]

wow...uh...

i didn't know they still made wordperfect!

well i guess...i don't know...is it really something to beat wordperfect?

 

[BornAgainMac]

The part I like about this story is that it is doing so well overall if you include both Windows and Mac users. It tells developers that the small marketshare of Mac users can matter. Corel only runs on Windows that has 20 times more users to buy it and it has a much smaller marketshare. I don't think there is anything wrong with Corel Office, it is a good package.

 

[-hh]

...NPD which reports that Apple's iWork has achieved a 2.7% unit share in 2005 "Office Suite" U.S. Retail Sales...

Microsoft Office, of course, carries approximately 95% of the remaining unit sales. When limiting the data to Mac sales only, Apple's iWork carries a 17.4% share compared to 82% for Microsoft.

As with all statistics, these numbers must be taken in context...

Which is why I'm scratching my head.

If only 17.4% of Mac's are using iWork, but has captured 2.7% of the total market, then that would suggest that the current formula that includes the market share for Macs vs PC's would be:

(Mac Marketshare-%) * 17.4% = 2.7%

(Mac Marketshare-%) = 2.7% / 17.4%
(Mac Marketshare-%) = 15.5%


IIRC, MacWorld just had a report last friday that said that Apple's ~33%ish growth in 2005 raised the Mac's marketshare up to 4%.

15% vs 4% is a huge difference ... it suggests a major error in someone's math, somewhere!

For example, if you believe the 4% Mac/PC total marketshare to be true and the 2.7% iWork total marketshare to be true, then 2.7%/4% = 67.5% of all Mac users would have to be using iWork.


-hh

 

[DeSnousa]

Which is why I'm scratching my head.

If only 17.4% of Mac's are using iWork, but has captured 2.7% of the total market, then that would suggest that the current formula that includes the market share for Macs vs PC's would be:

<snip>

These stats are for the US. I believe about 80% of macs sold are in the US and therefore there is a greater share in the US when compared to the rest of the world

 

[oingoboingo]

I've found the opposite, NeoOffice is way to slow compared to iWork ('05). If I wan't to do something quickly, iWork is up and ready in a second, but NeoOffice takes ages to be in a ready state.

Yeah startup times are a different story, but I've always been amazed at the way that Keynote can drag a whole system down (my 1.6GHz G5 in this case) performing simple manipulations that you don't even notice in PowerPoint or OpenOffice.

 

[Thomas Harte]

15% vs 4% is a huge difference ... it suggests a major error in someone's math, somewhere!

Only if you assert that everybody who owns a computer buys a new Office suite every year. The difference could just be because Mac owners tend to be more affluent and to update their software more frequently. There may not have been an Office update on the Mac for two years, but there hasn't been one on the PC for three and iWork is updated annually.

 

[asxtb]

Only if you assert that everybody who owns a computer buys a new Office suite every year.

Or an office suite, period. I'm sure there are lots of people that buy a computer for something other than creating documents, and have no need for an office suite.

 

[aegisdesign]

I'll get iWork when they include it with a word processor. At least with Word, it feels Mac-like (unbelievable), and I can type/print a reasonable looking page without spending ten minutes trying to figure out how to format the thing. Unfortunately, TextEdit is more of a word processor than Pages.

Oh pur-lease. That's just rubbish.

 

[mymacluvsme]

WordPerfect? Wow, I remember using that when PCs were still running MS-DOS.

 

[aegisdesign]

Has it occured to anyone that Apple is not trying to *compete* with Office, but rather provide a better option for home use than Office is? Perhaps it's the opposite of "office": "home".

How many Keynote presentations do you do in your home?

Now that I'm out of school, I decided to try and use Pages more, and just upgraded to Pages 2. I'm using it for things like research papers, notes, reports to other people in our group, and after using it more and more, I have come to like it. Yes, formatting is different than Word, but sufficiently like Keynote (using the Inspector for everything) that it's comfortable now. The ability to place images where I want them on the page (and have them stay there) is perhaps its biggest asset. IMO, this makes "layout" and "formatting" much better than in Word.

Sorry for the long-winded answer, but I hope more and more people will use Pages, not just to provide an alternative to Word, but because there is real value there, if you take the time to learn.

Well said. I've never really liked the way Word did it's formatting and stylesheets back as far as I remember. Back on Windows I used to use Samna AmiPro which later became Lotus' WordPro. That used to have a kind of document inspector and excellent style sheet handling too. I find long time MS Office users seem to have many problems using Pages as it's 'done right' IME and not the MS way. Given a willingness to change how you work and think about how your document is structured and formatted, Pages has hidden depths that a casual Word user won't appreciate. If you're the type of Word user that goes through your document using the font menu instead of the stylesheet then perhaps you should relearn your habits. In the web design world I find the difference between Word and Pages about as profound as HTML with FONT tags embedded and XHTML and CSS. Word is old. Pages is new. Some people can't cope with new.

Pages 2 also moves the bar set by Pages 1 further on. It's not a radical change but they've concentrated on fixing most of the things that were a little clunky in v1 and it's quite a bit faster at longer documents than v1.

I wonder if we won't see a link between Pages/Keynote and Grapher at some point to solve the scientific equation desire from some users. At the moment, Grapher allows you to copy the equation and graph to the clipboard and paste it into Pages. I'd be surprised if they didn't integrate Grapher into Pages directly.

And a spreadsheet is inevitable. I was really surprised 06 didn't include one although I still think iWork06 is incredibly good value for the two programs included in the 'Suite'.

06 is a solid upgrade rather than something spectacular. Here's hoping 07 brings the remainder of the 'Suite' - a semi decent spreadsheet, integrated Grapher and maybe a database app - which incidentally, MS Office lacks.

These stats are for the US. I believe about 80% of macs sold are in the US and therefore there is a greater share in the US when compared to the rest of the world

Wrong. From Apple's last financial report. Total Macintosh system sales.

USA - 515,000 - 49%
Europe - 387,000 - 36%
Japan - 81,000 - 8%
Other Segments - 78,000 - 7%

More Macs are sold outside the USA than inside. USA includes Canada too I think in this case.

Just an interested question here, have you (or anyone else) tried Open Office 2.0 on the Mac. Certainly on my Windows PC it was a big improvement in the "clunkyness" stakes, but my Windows PC is fast enough that any slow application seems OK (wrt office productivity tools)

The problem with OpenOffice on the Mac stems from it's use of X11 as it's interface. That's slow and un-Mac like. The implementation on Windows looks and feels substantially enough like a Windows application that you don't think it's any more clunky than Windows. Both Windows and X11 are as clunky as each other. The icons, design, colours are all psuedo-windows.

On the Mac, OpenOffice stands out like someone wearing fluro-socks and short trousers at a funeral plus it doesn't support all of the interoperability features of the OS you'd expect of an application.

NeoOffice addresses some of the clunkiness but not all.

MS Office for Mac is also miles better than the Windows version.

 

[gauchogolfer]

I wonder if we won't see a link between Pages/Keynote and Grapher at some point to solve the scientific equation desire from some users. At the moment, Grapher allows you to copy the equation and graph to the clipboard and paste it into Pages. I'd be surprised if they didn't integrate Grapher into Pages directly.

I didn't know this about Grapher, as I haven't taken the time to use it. I use Kaleidagraph for all my real plotting, and Mathematica for function graphing, so I haven't needed Grapher. It's a good idea to increase interoperability between programs, IMO; the Media browser in the Inspector is great. I currently use a LaTeX editor to generate pdfs for equations, and anything that makes this extra step unnecessary would be great (Export function from Mathematica?).

 

[CrazyWingman]

I had no idea iWork was selling at all...

Actually, iWork is selling so well that my local Apple store was completely sold out of the Family Pack and was getting low on the single copies when I went to pick it up last week.

They restocked in the next couple of days and I bought mine over the weekend. I'm finding it to be excellent so far. I'm redoing a newsletter for my fraternity, and it's been a very pleasant experience.

 

[Zatko]

Exporting

Beware of iWork's horrendous exporting ability. The PDF's it exports always look busted in Acrobat, which 95% of the people you'll be showing the PDF will be using.

 

[Thomas Harte]

MS Office for Mac is also miles better than the Windows version.

Perhaps that's why the Office 12 for Windows technical beta looks so much like a third party attempt at an iApp?

 

[aegisdesign]

Beware of iWork's horrendous exporting ability. The PDF's it exports always look busted in Acrobat, which 95% of the people you'll be showing the PDF will be using.

Not true. It has perfect exporting ability which is what causes the problem.

iWork 05 and many other applications on the Mac export PDF to the latest PDF v1.5 spec which wasn't supported until very recently by Adobe in it's reader. The workaround for iWork 05 in Tiger at least was to use 'Print' and then 'Save As...' and select PDF/X as the output. Otherwise transparency and shadows don't work.

With iWork 06, Apple seem to have realised that exporting to the latest spec wasn't actually good news for compatibility with users who've not updated their PDF reader and they now export in PDF v1.4 specification which anyone with Adobe Acrobat 5.0 or later can read. This is also good news if you send your output to a print shop as most of them are way behind the times.

I didn't know this about Grapher, as I haven't taken the time to use it. I use Kaleidagraph for all my real plotting, and Mathematica for function graphing, so I haven't needed Grapher. It's a good idea to increase interoperability between programs, IMO; the Media browser in the Inspector is great. I currently use a LaTeX editor to generate pdfs for equations, and anything that makes this extra step unnecessary would be great (Export function from Mathematica?).

I've no real need for equations or plotting graphs like Grapher does so I've rarely used it but it copies to the clip board as a PDF. You then paste it in to Pages and you can scale it without losing quality as it's not a bitmap.

I'd presume Grapher isn't as comprehensive as Mathematica but it certainly provides some level of equation editing and plotting to placate the cries of 'I can't use Pages as it doesn't have equation editing'.