A little insanity in the Apple world

I've heard some dumb things, but anyone that thinks that iWork is a real competitor to MS Office has been inside the reality distortion field for far too long.  Macs Only gushes the following.

While still a small U.S. retail market share of 2.7 per cent, iWork handily beat WordPerfect Office's 1.6 per cent. The same article quotes iWork's share on Macs of 17.4 per cent.

A small part of the market is the understatement of the year.  Can anyone seriously believe that iWork compares to MS Office?  Well in the Mac world 17.4 per cent of the users will buy anything including iWork. After all I bought it once.  I even used Pages once to create a document which looked nice until I tried to also put the same document on the web.  I just did a presentation with Keynote. I actually even kind of like Keynote inspite of the quirky interface and inability to generate html.  I don't see it gaining wide acceptance.

Only in the Mac world could people grab onto to a tiny bit of information like a "market share of 2.7 per cent" and try to make it look a wonderful victory.  I'm sorry but it just makes Mac people look desperate.

iWork is no competitor for MS Office.  Open Office might well be a real competitor to MS Office but the only place that iWork competes with MS Office is in the minds of people who probably have never used Office or iWork.

The good news is that MS still makes Office for the Mac.  The only better news would be more reasonable pricing for Office. 

In the cross platform world of our office, I can't see iWork being much of a force even if a miracle happened and we all ended up with Macs.  I was happy to get both my Powerbook and Dell Laptop hooked up to our Samba server.  It's amazing how easy things are when you have someone helping you who knows what they are doing. (Thanks Korey) It's even better when they know how to help Mac users operate in a cross platform world.

Comments

[Michael]

As you say, the Reality Distortion Field (RDF) is a curious phenomenon. In truth, iWork is a pretty limited package. Indeed, in some respects it is *less* capable than the withdrawn Appleworks, which at least has a spreadsheet program of a sort.

And, as I understand it, new Macs not only no longer ship with a free copy of Appleworks but also don't ship with a free copy of iWork either - just a demo. Can you name a major OEM that doesn't ship at least Word and MS Works on a new Windows machine?

And it's not as if Macs come cheap. To be frank, while the new Macbook is duo-core, unlike most current Windows laptops, other OEMs *are* currently shipping machines with that chip and are, in general, offering rather more in terms of hardware specs for rather less in terms of money.

I think Jobs conceives the public as a cash cow that will cough up unlimited amounts of money whenever asked on a regular cycle. Of course, the RDF is strong enough that the real Mac fans will. But it's not going to work with everyone.

I have to say I've had enough insight into Apple's money-grubbing for a lifetime. Over the past three years I've bought two laptops, one desktop, two iPods, an iSight camera, numerous OS upgrades and additional software both of the company's own and from third-parties through their store. I've also been responsible for putting a great deal of custom their way via recommendation and persuasion and demonstrations of my Apple kit to family and friends.

No more. One of my laptops had to go back twice to Apple in the first few months in which I owned it before they fixed the fault it shipped with. Another is now about three years old - I just sank another £160 in having the hard drive replaced. As soon as I got it back the logicboard failed. I was told by my repairman that it was a recognized fault, and that Apple ***acknowledge that the machines shipped with defective logicboards*** and will replace the part out of warranty.

The main dealer my guy deals with asked for the part but Apple refused to supply it, saying that they only replace this part - that they themselves admit is defective - for three years. That three years apparently ran out in December. I rang and explained to them that the problem dates back to August, so that it had failed well within the three years. I live out in the sticks and my engineer had promised to pick the machine up and take it to the dealer as he goes there regularly ... but did nothing for months. In the end I had to make a special journey in myself.

All this means nothing to Apple who still refused a replacement. Now I have an expensive doorstop.

Leander Kahney is right: with Apple it is soak the customer and fill your pockets and that is all:

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70072-0.html?tw=rss.index

After this, I will never buy another product from Apple as long as I live; I will never recommmend their products to anyone; and I shall tell my story to others to warn them.

[Chris]

Actually, I think this just shows how dominant MS is in the Office Suite business, and how Corel has been obliterated.

[Spike72AFA]

No it is not a M$ Office killer. There are just too many reasons why, in the corporate world, you must have all the apps that come in Office. Excel alone is one reason why many of us cannot become M$ free. And Outlook is a primary reason why many of us have to fight the IT gestapo just to use a Mac.

That said, Keynote is so much more elegant than PowerPoint. You truly can give much better presentations with it. Whenever I give a presentation in front of a non-Apple crowd, people breathlessly ask me how I did some of the things in the presentation. It just looks that much better.

Pages, OTOH, is a weird duck. It is a very good document producer. But its way of doing things are different enough from Word that many people are put off. I use it as my primary WP and import/export with Word freely. Not a problem for me.

Bottom line on the article. Yes iWork is #2. But if you are 90% points behind, is it worth crowing about it?

[cre8ive]

My initial thought after Steve's keynote was the lack of attention iWork actually got. With iWork, it's like Apple are saying "well, we have our own little Office Suite. It's kind of okay. It can't do all the things MS Office can, but feel free to try it."

At the end of the day MS Office is pretty decent. We use 2004 for the Mac here at the studio when needed. Though I do agree with Spike72AFA - Keynote is much nicer for presentations.

Maybe there's now a deal with Microsoft where Apple need to 'downplay' iWork, perhaps because Microsoft are in with Mac Office for another five years.

Yes - when you here news like iWork being number two, it's truly amazing what drives the Apple world at times.

[NoMoreJihad]

Uhm, didn't you miss the point? Apple doesn't position iWork as a competitor to Office. It's not intended to be that, and it isn't. With that said, isn't it interesting that iWork fills the needs that many people have for word processing, layout, and such? Could that be because that's what it's *supposed to do* instead of "doing everything under the sun" a la Office? So there isn't really any "being behind" and "being ahead" because the products are not competitors, despite some sites' miscategorization of them. And if comparing the two as if they were equivalent products is lame, then aren't you equally as lame for insisting that people who favor iWork have "probably never" used M$ Office? As for "making people look desperate", it seems that you have some desperation of your own, working so hard to bag on sites that should be beneath your attention in the first place. I mean, if the Mac marketplace is as silly, criminal, and irrelevant as you and your commenters think, then it doesn't matter much, right? Reading this blog is kinda like reading comments from ex-Catholics who spend all their time talking about how bad Catholicism is. They're too interested by half.

[ocracokewaves]

Actually you missed the point, I didn't blame Apple, and I'm not an ex-Apple user, I sitting in front of two of them right now. I've used all the programs, and I think Keynote is pretty good. Sure they don't compare, and I expect there are number of people who have both of them like I do. Even Pages does okay unless you want to post it to the web. However, it's just a laugh that iWork got so much attention. Apple being number 2 in the Office Suite market isn't something I dreamed up. Apple wouldn't dream it up because Apple doesn't like to do anything public where they aren't number 1.

Actually the headline that I saw later was "Apple's iWork emerges as rival to Microsoft Office" and it came from C/Net not even a site I consider in the Mac universe so they should know better. Maybe it was a slow computer news day, but it was funny.

http://news.com.com/Apples+iWork+emerges+as+rival+to+Microsoft+Office/2100-1012_3-6030011.html

Yours was the second longest comment and so you might have a look in the mirror before calling people lame, and I don't consider Mac sites beneath my attention. I enjoy reading Mac sites when I have time. I get better support from some of them than I do from Apple, and there's usually an interesting perspective to be had from many of them.

[Steven Luce]

While I agree that a 2.7 percent marketshare for iWork is far from worthy pubilicity...but I have to disagree with you on a couple of quick points...

First, even though Pages lacks some of Word's features (actually a fairly large set), it does come with a whole slew of layout tools that Word users can only dream about. And, Pages, unlike Word or Publisher (on PC), creates PDFs that a printing house can actually use for printing. I've been a graphic designer for 15 years, and while InDesign is till my tool of choice, there isn't anything on the PC end of things (or coming out of Microsoft for the Mac), that can compete with Pages' combination of simplicity and general usability. Also, unlike Word, I don't have to spend countless wasted hours fighting with annoying and persistent spelling correction (even after disabling the option in the preferences), piss-poor selection tools, and downright horrific font rendering. For a small business like mine, it is a hell of a lot easier in Pages to generate letterheads and other office communications that require a certain professional touch, than it is in any of Microsoft's applications.

Now on to Keynote...Say what you will about the HTML export, but Keynote is all about presentations (not unifying your office workflow), and it delivers...big time. There is absolutely no way possible to achieve the level of visual sophistication and acumen in Power Point that Keynote delivers quickly and easily. Period. Only someone with absolutely no design abilities and no visual taste whatsoever, would even consider putting Power Point in the same realm as Keynote. Don't get me wrong, Power Point is strong on certain features, but none of them actually have anything to do with wowing clients or communicating ideas.

That said, I do not see iWork as an Office competitor...yet. But I already stopped using Word for many of my design-critical word processing tasks, and I long ago ditched Power Point for Keynote. If Apple adds a speadsheet to package...who knows? iWork is already a more enjoyable user experience, and I doubt HTML export and a couple of scripting functions will keep me around.