“No application, from Microsoft, has been more important for the Mac’s long-term survival than Microsoft Office,” Arik Hesseldahl writes for BusinessWeek.
“Office for the Mac continues to be the best-selling piece of Mac software that doesn’t come from Apple,” Hesseldahl writes. “So it was a tad surprising that Apple announced on Aug. 7 a new version of its own office productivity software, dubbed iWork ’08. Included in iWork, which will sell for $79, is a new application called Numbers, a spreadsheet application analogous to Microsoft Excel, but as with all things made for the Mac, Apple made it easier to use.”
“Previously, iWork had contained only Pages, a word-processing program comparable in many respects to Microsoft Word, and Keynote, a presentation program that is comparable to, but far better than PowerPoint… Adding Numbers completed the circle,” Hesseldahl writes.
“So, as of this week, Apple has its own office software suite that does more or less the same things, is compatible with Office, and sells for just a little more than half of Office’s starting price of $149,” Hesseldahl writes.
“Should Microsoft be worried? Certainly not yet. I checked with Chris Swenson, an analyst with NPD Group, a market research firm that tracks retail software sales. What effect if any, has there been on sales of Office for the Mac in reaction to Google, Zoho, and ThinkFree? ‘None. Zero. Zip,’ he said. Microsoft Office for the Mac enjoys a market share in the neighborhood of 97%, while its nearest competitor is Apple’s iWork, which comes in at 1.8%,” Hesseldahl writes.
In his full article, Hesseldahl explains why Apple bothers with iWork and explains why Microsoft bothers building Office for the Mac (hint: big profts) and wonders why, with Mac sales growth running well ahead (3X) of the rest of the PC industry, why is Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit down to producing one flagship application and just a few minor other apps?
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Many Mac users — the majority, we believe — think they need Office, but really don’t. Give Apple’s free 30-day iWork ’08 trial a try and see for yourself.
I would finally switch from Office if ONLY Apple would finnally give me a unified address book, email, and calendar….if they could only merge those three dman apps or at least make them interoperate more smoothly. …
re: One only need Office to be compatible with the rest of the World. Sad but true.
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TOTAL CRAP.
Now Apple has numbers in iWork you can just bin your copy of office!
iWork saves files in compatible word and excel and powerpoint formats.
So, YOU DONT need to buy MS Office to be compatible.
Im still using Office 2004 on my macs, now that is just gonna be bined when I come back from buying iWork 08 from the Apple Store tomorrow.
Tomorrow my macs will be TOTALLY MICROSOFT FREE!!
An entourage type program would seal the deal for me. I like having email, address book, and calendar all in the same program. maybe in leapord…
With Microsoft’s new Office formats becoming an open standard, you will no longer need to actually use Office to be compatible.
I’ve been looking at Numbers for a couple of nights. It’s an interesting approach to the spreadsheet ap. In its initial form, I don’t see it challenging Excel for hard core spreadsheet users. Excel has more features and is first and foremost a programming language in a spreadsheet metaphor. Presenting the data is the secondary function.
Numbers has the beginnings of a good spreadsheet and enough power for the casual user, but its primary function (it is iWork) is presentation. As such, it is a shift in thinking to use it effectively.
Compatible – Yes
Replacement – NO!
While I love working on the Mac, none of the office suites (whether free or $79) come close to replacing MS Office.
Unless screws Office: Mac users in the future *AND* someone else comes up with a replacement that is leaps and bounds better, then even trying out the new MS Office-wannabe isn’t worth the time for many.
iWork is good enough for some, but not even worth the time for many especially if you’ve purchased MS Office already.
Long live Microsoft on the Mac!
@Roel,
Thank you so very much. I really appreciate it!
I totally agree MPC guy. As a solitary Mac user in a PC environment, I need MS Office. None of the substitutes will cut it. It’s partly reality (file transfers from other programs are, at best, imperfect) and partly perception (when the IT dweebs see Office on my Mac, their wee minds are set at rest).
I’ve said it before on this forum – Mac users are indebted to the MS Mac business unit. They do a great job for us.
I thought it funny that Apple used home photos/movies to show to the journalists. If iLife and iWork had been used to show off commercial photos & documents the impact would have been huge.
I have only needed for Apple to come out with a speadsheet for me to finally completely give up Office. YEA!
Yes, it will be even better when it works with a database, but that is likely coming. I played with Numbers for only an hour and while there will be a bit of a learning curve, I was amazed.
Oh, and for the people that think they need office ‘just in case’, one nice thing that apple did was allow their demos to still open files even after the demo runs out.. Even though you can’t save or print after that, you can still continually see the value of the program every time someone sends you a powerpoint file or a word document that you have no way of opening..
I am a Mac zealot, and I have hated having office on my powerbook, Im getting close to uninstalling it for good. Google Docs works very well for the majority of what I do. I think that by october when I get 10.5, a bigger hard drive, ill go ahead and get iWork along with iLife.
Sorry Petey, it’s not total crap, it’s true.
I downloaded the trial last night and installed in on my Power Mac. I opened a very large technical design document in Word that I am working on at work that has a ton of images, tables, comments and change tracking in it. The document did not read perfectly and worse, when I tried editting and saving it before re-opening it in Word, it was even more messed up.
There is no way I could trust critical work going out to a client with this. I have no choice but to stick with Word at this point.
“to hotinplaya
You asked “Is there a way to upload a Keynote into your .Mac account, so people can view your presentation, like you can upload your iphoto into gallery.”.
The issue that’s being danced around here isn’t whether Keynote presentations can be viewed on a PC, it how do you does a PC view a Mac’s screen. Once you figure that out, you’re good to go. If your solution is to serve the presentation from a PC, then save the Keynote presentation as a PDF. You can export the Keynote to a PowerPoint doc, but the easiest way to ensure everything looks EXACTLY as you intend is to create a PDF.
Oh, and if you have a bunch of pop-up type text or stuff that slides in from the side or whatever, then quit using the “fancy” stuff. 99% of the time, it just distracts from the presentation. With the exception of Steve Jobs, I haven’t seen anyone whose timing is so good that they can pull off using these types of things.
Now all we need is a database app included with iWork. I would love to use FileMaker Pro, but it’s too expensive.
When it comes to Office, Mac people should not give Microsoft a hard time. The Office programs, especially Excel, are fine applications. I like Entourage as well; I’m so used to using it (and Outlook Express on Mac OS 9 before) that I can’t effectively use Apple’s solutions (not yet).
Numbers is a good version 1.0 program and fine as a basic spreadsheet program. But it can’t do the advanced Excel data analysis functions, such as pivot tables. And Apple needs Office to be available for those business settings where Office for Windows is the standard. We don’t want Mac users having to reboot into Windows or use Parallels Desktop, just to run Office. The alternative Office “clones” are better than before, but they are not 100% compatible.
The Microsoft MacBU (the largest group of Mac developers outside Apple) does great work. Long live the MacBU. Looking forward to using Office 2008.
For the last few years I’ve been running a business using only Mac. It was my goal to function as a manufacturers rep using only Mac related products. In the beginning I was lucky enough to find NeoOffice and lived through there growing pains. Last year, I got iWorks 06 and found that it severed me well. My only complete was that at time it can be a bit slow. Yesterday, I downloaded the demo of iWorks 08 and to my surprise it’s much improved and much faster. In fact I can’t remember the last time I had to use my copy of NeoOffice. This morning one of my manufacturers send me a letter written on the latest non-vista “Windows” software and when I went to open it – it open nicely in “Pages”, I read the letter, wrote my replay and sent it back to the manufacturer as a “window’s” doc.
Bottom-Line it time to stop feeding M$$$ and start enjoying letter writing!
Another vote for NeoOffice. A great program that is free and just plain works. Try it since it is free there is no risk. I too once thought I at least had to have the MS office app on my Macs – but no more
Well,
M$ isn’t worried about iWork for 2 reasons:
1. Numbers is no Excel. The capabilities just aren’t there yet. Of course, Numbers will only get better, while Excel only gets more bloated — without fixing long-standing bugs (unary minus, stat distributions, etc.). Excel has been around for over 20 years. (Initially called ‘Multiplan’.) That’s a lot of catching up to do…
But No 2 is the killer.
2. M$ has introduced a document “rights management” system. Corporations can control who can read, write, change, etc,, any Office doc. And of course it takes another M$ server to handle. That’s something that’s way, way down the road for iWork.
But for individuals, SOHO, or K-12, inroads are a comin’…
Anyone know if it’s possible to buy Entourage as a standalone app? I guess that I could live w/o Office when Pages gets better (multi language support + thesaurus!). However, even though search and smartgroups are way ahead of anything else out there, Apple’s Mail still sucks royal donkeynuts compared to Entourage – including the stuff I’ve seen from Mail in Leopard.
How many of us bought iWork08 and iLife08 the day after Steve J demoed it?
I did (both family packs) so far I am very impressed with Numbers but I think it needs to get it’s own Applescript library fast for it to eat into Excel market share.
For example I would love to be able to use it to talk to mail to send invoices and to communicate with MYOB and FMpro. Please Apple give us an update soon. I could really sell this baby.
“re: One only need Office to be compatible with the rest of the World. Sad but true.
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TOTAL CRAP.”
As others have said; No, not total crap. I have been both a student and a teacher in the last year, and you just can’t take the chance of having a very important grade affected by a paper submitted with formatting problems.
I use Keynote totally for my own class presentations, but if I have to share the file, it makes more sense to do it in PPT and dial back the special effects to what PPT can handle. It takes too long to create it in Keynote and then check it in PPT to see if it is compatible. PPT does not handle inserted media well, and not at all in multiples per slide.
Word and Excel: I don’t like them, mainly because they are bloated with hundreds of “features” that almost no one uses and you have to remember the meaning of all those icons and menus to find what you need. Is there a single human being alive who knows what all of their “features” are, let alone use them?
I use Pages whenever possible, and I think that if Apple makes the right feature choices for iWork, ie the ones that 90% of the people actually use, and make those choices easy to use, they will eventually win the game. Resist the choice to imitate the Microsoft way of adding a feature for the sake of features.
I would love to get an upgrade price from iWork 06, but be realistic; look at the value that iWork provides so I won’t complain about it.
BTW: slightly off topic
For almost 10 years I have been beating the drum that Apple’s tv ads CAN show the best features of the Mac operating system in 30 seconds.
iPhone adds prove my point!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well done! All you have to do is resist the temptation to try to say too much, but being a creative person myself, I know how hard that is.
(you can thank me be sending me an iPhone for free) except we don’t have AT&T!!!!!
The latest NeoOffice is very good as well. It can replace M$ Office but I am not sure it can replace iWork ’08. Using ‘Numbers’ to present well numbers/information is fantastic. I am soooo glad Apple used AppleWorks ability to draw a spread sheet anywhere. I always was frustrated and felt locked (upper left) into Excel. When I needed a spread sheet in AppleWorks, I created a text doc and drew in my spread sheet table on top. Always did this.
iWork 08… at last…
Ok; just downloaded and tried all compared to 06 versions.
Faster
Numbers is much easier to use than Excel; will trade off the exotic functions that Excel has for ease of use, in the end will accomplish much more because of ease of use.
If, like most reviewers, you look at the changes from 06 to 08 in 3 minutes, it’s not going to look like that much. But like OSX, when you actually dive in and use the apps, you begin to see the dozens of small things that are better.
It reminds me of my experience in auto racing over a 20 year period. We tried to make everything that we did consistently 1% better than our competitors. We even showed them what we were doing. But the guys running at the back (consistently behind us) never would believe that a consistent 1% across the board will allow you to dominate! They always thought we won because we were cheating, or outspending them (NOT TRUE!) or plain old magic. You could not convince them, so just go out and run 1% faster every lap.
It’s all in the details, and the incremental improvements in iWork can only be seen if you compare them to 06 and to Office.