Quote:
Originally Posted by
anantksundaram 
Again, let me explain to you: Stuff saved in iWork '09 cannot be opened in iWork '08.
Do the following thought experiment in an intellectually honest way (if you can): If Microsoft came out with Office '09, and '10, each backwards-incompatible with the previous version, and yet had charged the same for the new versions, you would have complained.
All I am suggesting is, there was a huge shift when Apple moved from 10.5 to 10.6, and I am simply hoping that the same does not happen when Apple moves from 10.6 nontouch to 10.6 touch. You should too.
You mean like their new .docx format, not available in previous versions of Office? Like that? Like when the made it the default format for their Windows version of Office and then didn't even have a translator for Mac? Like that? Uh, people did complain. Maybe you just weren't paying attention. But Office made it possible to store in an alternate format, and so global meltdown was averted. Whew.
Microsoft has a long history of going out of its way to be incompatible with Office formats, and they've changed enough times to legitimately wonder if 'incompatibility' isn't the primary reason. They did .rtf, and when people figured out .rtf, they moved to .doc, and now that everyone has pretty much figured out .doc, they give us .docx.
Since you want to talk about intellectual honesty, try and understand what happened that forced the change from Pages 08 to Pages 09 (if you can). The Pages 08 format was a package. That's a nifty design but it has problems. You might put it in a .zip to email it, then unzip it, and viola! it's a folder with stuff in it. The Pages engineers realized they had a broken (or anyway suboptimal) file format and they changed the format to a flat file. It wasn't ill will, or pique, or a desire to force migration (though they're happy enough to prod you in that direction, no doubt). If you have Pages 08, no, it won't open that 09 file. But you could have saved it in a .doc format or a .rtf format.
You're lecturing about this like you think you're parting the clouds. But everybody you're lecturing probably knows all this. I sure do. It's not like Pages has become the de facto file-exchange standard, anyhow, and they nearly brought industry to its knees with a thoughtless format change. How many Pages files that you open were created by someone outside your immediate circle? running version 2+ levels different from your own? whom you couldn't call and say, 'Hey dude, save that file in .rtf for me, willya."?
Complaining about the near certainty of a 2010 version of iWork is like me bitching that the sun shouldn't rise today just because I had a bad weekend. If it's inconvenient to me that the inevitable happen, I need to deal with it. Likewise, if it's inconvenient to you that iWork 2010 might come, well then, it's up to you to deal with that. But of all the things in the world, an inconvenient but optional software update is about the most trivial thing in the world to lose your water about.