Unless you can find another program that outsells iWork against Office, then it is indeed the primary competitor.
OpenOffice 'outsells' (though not in terms of revenue, as OO is free and iWork is not) iWork and pretty much any other office suite out there, Corel included (not Office though).
This is a limited analysis as it only takes into account the US retail sales, and as such, excludes not only the rest of the world, but also those suites that do not sell in retail shelves but are distributed freely.
Unless you can find another program that outsells iWork against Office, then it is indeed the primary competitor. Nobody says it's ready to overtake Office, but if you don't understand what "primary" and "#1 competitor" (to use your own words) means, then maybe you need to go back to English class.
Wow. Where did that come from? Calm down, man. I'm an Apple shareholder too.
The whole argument of this article is FLAWED. While I'm glad to see iWork get some positive ink, and I personally love the app, I highly doubt it has taken ANY sales away from Microsoft on the Mac platform.
iWork is incomplete (no spreadsheet) and the compatibility with MS Office is 'marginal' at best (formatting errors etc.).
I love iWork, and often use it instead of Office for slick layouts/presentations, but I still own Office. I suspect that the majority of iWork users ALSO own Office, so it hasn't eaten Microsoft's business one bit.
The whole argument of this article is FLAWED. While I'm glad to see iWork get some positive ink, and I personally love the app, I highly doubt it has taken ANY sales away from Microsoft on the Mac platform.
iWork is incomplete (no spreadsheet) and the compatibility with MS Office is 'marginal' at best (formatting errors etc.).
I love iWork, and often use it instead of Office for slick layouts/presentations, but I still own Office. I suspect that the majority of iWork users ALSO own Office, so it hasn't eaten Microsoft's business one bit.
Just relax. It is a single article that reports on a single, numerical facet of sales of the products. Nothing more.
OpenOffice 'outsells' (though not in terms of revenue, as OO is free and iWork is not) iWork and pretty much any other office suite out there, Corel included (not Office though).
Competitor to Office? Looks like Apple better get a move on their spreadsheet program and some LookOut look-alike...
Mail + iCal + Address Book are already there, and in most regards are far better than Outlook. Outlook is a disaster: it crashes all the time, has inadequate search capability, and doesn't work well with older version of Outlook. Believe it or not, if you're using Mail.app and get an invite or calendar item from someone with Outlook, you can just click on the attachment and iCal soaks it right up. Back in my companies earlier days, I used my mac and everyone else had a PC with various versions of Outlook or Outlook Express. I was the only one who never missed a memo.
I have iWork. Pages is, dare I say, better than Word. Word is just too bloated. It tries to do everything, and by doing so ends up costing companies a lot of money when corporate desk jockeys think that a layout all gussied-up in Word is going to be able to go to the press. No. Doing layouts in Word is unpredictable and it drives DTP people crazy when they have to undo all of the proprietary formatting only to have to redo it.
Pages just tries to be a word processor with templates. Much easier to deal with.
Sure you can mail iCal events to people, but there's no central booking system whereby you can check a person/resource's schedule before booking them as you can do with Outlook and Exchange.
Huh? There is. You need a WebDAV server or a .mac account and you publish a calendar to that. From there you can look at any user's published calendar and subscribe to them in iCal.
I set up a local Mac WebDAV server for one of my clients. It costs nothing, unlike Exchange Server.
Alternatively, Kerio do a very nice server package, again for less than Exchange.
Both aren't 'as you can do in Outlook and Exchange' but there's more than one way of doing things.
Although Microsoft Office retains 95% of the general market, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice have secured 14% of the large enterprise market as of 2004 [10]. The OpenOffice.org web site reports almost 50 million downloads.
On October 4, 2005, Sun and Google announced a strategic partnership. As part of this agreement, Sun will add a Google search bar to OpenOffice.org, Sun and Google will engage in joint marketing activities as well as joint research and development, and Google will help distribute OpenOffice.org. [11]
In France, OpenOffice.org has attracted the attention of both local and national government administrations who wish to rationalize their software procurement, as well as have stable, standard file formats for archival purposes. It is now the official office suite for the French Gendarmerie.
Betcha you'll be able to in Leopard. It's called "stealth" development. It's right under your nose, but you still can't see it. =]
So much under his nose that he's not noticed you can do it already. in iCal, create a new event, click attendees and it pulls them from your address book, click 'Send invitation' at the bottom of the drawer. Mails go out and users with iCal get the even added to their calendars if accepted.
According to my (knowingly poor) arithmetic, if iWork has 17.4% share in Macs which equates to 2.7% share overall, that makes 15.5% of the market's installed base Macs.
This is only valid if every single Windows and Mac user goes to the store and buys a suite. But many users don't -- maybe Office came bundled with their computer, or they might not own any suite at all. So we can't draw any conclusions about Mac market share from these numbers alone.
For example, with these percentages, the Mac market could just as easily be 10%. Assume there are 1000 users, 100 Mac users and 900 Windows users. Of those, let's say only 325 users purchased a suite, with 9 users (2.7%) buying iWork and 309 users (95%) buying Office (Windows or Mac). We could also say that of the 100 Mac users, only 50 of them purchased a suite, with the same 9 users (17.4%) buying iWork and 41 users (82%) buying Office for the Mac.
So all the numbers are valid in this scenario, and yet we have only 10% Mac market share. Therefore, NPD's statements tell us nothing about overall market share.
Corel is correct when it says that the Wordperfect Suite is installed on numerous computers at point of sale.
These numbers just reflect the retail versions. If Apple installed the full version of iWork on all of its machines, the way it used to, with Appleworks, then the numbers would be higher, if these installs were counted, and because more people would be buying a new copy as an upgrade than do now.
But, let's be reasonable. iWork is not a substitute for Office. It seems to be a substitute for Appleworks. And it isn't there yet.
Also, downloading OO doesn't mean that it is being used. I've downloaded all of the major version upgrades, but I just examine them. I don't use them. I know plenty of people on Windows who do the same. 50 million downloads mean nothing. How many people here have downloaded shareware or freeware, used it a few times, and never used it again?
StarOffice has not gained any traction despite being much cheaper per seat. Those numbers cited are suspect.
The same thing is true about the many Linux distro's out there. Many have been downloaded. But how many are actually being used? How many are being used to the exclusion of something else?
How many of those 50 million downloads are of the latest version, and not just upgrades from previous versions? How many are from different people, and not from the same people? And, again, how many are being used on a regular basis, rather than merely being looked at, out of curiosity?
Erwin Tenhumberg, a product marketing manager in Sun's client system group, told the OASIS Adoption Forum in London on Tuesday that OpenOffice.org has been downloaded "close to" 48 million times in the five years since the project was founded. Although this number may include duplicate downloads, the average user of OpenOffice downloads it six times but installs it on nine machines, according to a survey of 5000 people downloading the application that was cited by Tenhumberg.
He also pointed out that this number does not include OpenOffice.org mirror sites or open source CDs and Linux distributions that package the office productivity application.
Disks containing open source software that include OpenOffice have been distributed by a number of governments worldwide, including the Indian government, which is distributing 7 million CDs containing Tamil and Hindi versions of open source applications to the public, and the local government in the French region of Auvergne, which has distributed 64,000 packs of CDs to students.
Because no one tracks what happens to any of these downloads. This is the biggest problem that has been noted with Open Source as regards to numbers in use. All sorts of claims are being made, but they prove nothing. Even if the Indian government is distributing 7 million copies, it doesn't mean that they will be used. There is no way to tell.
It's the same situation we had a year or so ago, when IDC reported high percentages of Linux adoption in third world countries. What happens, as they acknowledged later, is that these computers are sold with Linux installed. The new buyer sees a person outside the store selling disks with both Windows and Office on them. For a couple of bucks, they buy the disk, and convert the machine to windows.
I've downloaded OO myself, at least four times. Does this mean, according to Tenhumberg, that I have four copies that are being used, rather than the one of the last version, which is NOT being used? 48 million copies downloaded over the last five years, might mean that there are four or five million of the latest version that are actually being used, as well as a couple million of older versions that are being used. The versions that were available more than about two years ago were not usable on a daily basis. How many of the downloads were of those early feature lacking, poorly function-able, versions? Is there any breakdown, the way we can get for commercial versions of software? No, there is not.
What we have, is supposition, and well meaning, but also self-serving number surveys, that tell us little.
Because no one tracks what happens to any of these downloads.
This is a good point. I have downloaded stuff (Open Office is one example in fact) 3-4 times at different times, places and for different reasons and I am presently not using it anywhere or anytime.
This is a good point. I have downloaded stuff (Open Office is one example in fact) 3-4 times at different times, places and for different reasons and I am presently not using it anywhere or anytime.
Same here. I grab a copy every few months to see how it's coming along, but haven't to date actually *kept* a copy for use. I launch, I scream, I claw my eyes out, I delete. One of these days I'm hoping the cycle will break, but so far... no go.
Comments
Originally posted by Kolchak
Unless you can find another program that outsells iWork against Office, then it is indeed the primary competitor.
OpenOffice 'outsells' (though not in terms of revenue, as OO is free and iWork is not) iWork and pretty much any other office suite out there, Corel included (not Office though).
This is a limited analysis as it only takes into account the US retail sales, and as such, excludes not only the rest of the world, but also those suites that do not sell in retail shelves but are distributed freely.
Originally posted by Kolchak
Unless you can find another program that outsells iWork against Office, then it is indeed the primary competitor. Nobody says it's ready to overtake Office, but if you don't understand what "primary" and "#1 competitor" (to use your own words) means, then maybe you need to go back to English class.
Wow. Where did that come from? Calm down, man. I'm an Apple shareholder too.
iWork is incomplete (no spreadsheet) and the compatibility with MS Office is 'marginal' at best (formatting errors etc.).
I love iWork, and often use it instead of Office for slick layouts/presentations, but I still own Office. I suspect that the majority of iWork users ALSO own Office, so it hasn't eaten Microsoft's business one bit.
Originally posted by Sport73
The whole argument of this article is FLAWED. While I'm glad to see iWork get some positive ink, and I personally love the app, I highly doubt it has taken ANY sales away from Microsoft on the Mac platform.
iWork is incomplete (no spreadsheet) and the compatibility with MS Office is 'marginal' at best (formatting errors etc.).
I love iWork, and often use it instead of Office for slick layouts/presentations, but I still own Office. I suspect that the majority of iWork users ALSO own Office, so it hasn't eaten Microsoft's business one bit.
Just relax. It is a single article that reports on a single, numerical facet of sales of the products. Nothing more.
Originally posted by Gene Clean
OpenOffice 'outsells' (though not in terms of revenue, as OO is free and iWork is not) iWork and pretty much any other office suite out there, Corel included (not Office though).
Citation please.
Originally posted by kmok1
Competitor to Office? Looks like Apple better get a move on their spreadsheet program and some LookOut look-alike...
Mail + iCal + Address Book are already there, and in most regards are far better than Outlook. Outlook is a disaster: it crashes all the time, has inadequate search capability, and doesn't work well with older version of Outlook. Believe it or not, if you're using Mail.app and get an invite or calendar item from someone with Outlook, you can just click on the attachment and iCal soaks it right up. Back in my companies earlier days, I used my mac and everyone else had a PC with various versions of Outlook or Outlook Express. I was the only one who never missed a memo.
I have iWork. Pages is, dare I say, better than Word. Word is just too bloated. It tries to do everything, and by doing so ends up costing companies a lot of money when corporate desk jockeys think that a layout all gussied-up in Word is going to be able to go to the press. No. Doing layouts in Word is unpredictable and it drives DTP people crazy when they have to undo all of the proprietary formatting only to have to redo it.
Pages just tries to be a word processor with templates. Much easier to deal with.
Originally posted by auxio
Sure you can mail iCal events to people, but there's no central booking system whereby you can check a person/resource's schedule before booking them as you can do with Outlook and Exchange.
Huh? There is. You need a WebDAV server or a .mac account and you publish a calendar to that. From there you can look at any user's published calendar and subscribe to them in iCal.
I set up a local Mac WebDAV server for one of my clients. It costs nothing, unlike Exchange Server.
Alternatively, Kerio do a very nice server package, again for less than Exchange.
Both aren't 'as you can do in Outlook and Exchange' but there's more than one way of doing things.
Originally posted by Chris Cuilla
Citation please.
Market share
Although Microsoft Office retains 95% of the general market, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice have secured 14% of the large enterprise market as of 2004 [10]. The OpenOffice.org web site reports almost 50 million downloads.
On October 4, 2005, Sun and Google announced a strategic partnership. As part of this agreement, Sun will add a Google search bar to OpenOffice.org, Sun and Google will engage in joint marketing activities as well as joint research and development, and Google will help distribute OpenOffice.org. [11]
In France, OpenOffice.org has attracted the attention of both local and national government administrations who wish to rationalize their software procurement, as well as have stable, standard file formats for archival purposes. It is now the official office suite for the French Gendarmerie.
Citation
Originally posted by BronxRed
Betcha you'll be able to in Leopard. It's called "stealth" development. It's right under your nose, but you still can't see it. =]
So much under his nose that he's not noticed you can do it already. in iCal, create a new event, click attendees and it pulls them from your address book, click 'Send invitation' at the bottom of the drawer. Mails go out and users with iCal get the even added to their calendars if accepted.
Originally posted by Gene Clean
Citation
Thank you.
Originally posted by fuyutsuki
According to my (knowingly poor) arithmetic, if iWork has 17.4% share in Macs which equates to 2.7% share overall, that makes 15.5% of the market's installed base Macs.
This is only valid if every single Windows and Mac user goes to the store and buys a suite. But many users don't -- maybe Office came bundled with their computer, or they might not own any suite at all. So we can't draw any conclusions about Mac market share from these numbers alone.
For example, with these percentages, the Mac market could just as easily be 10%. Assume there are 1000 users, 100 Mac users and 900 Windows users. Of those, let's say only 325 users purchased a suite, with 9 users (2.7%) buying iWork and 309 users (95%) buying Office (Windows or Mac). We could also say that of the 100 Mac users, only 50 of them purchased a suite, with the same 9 users (17.4%) buying iWork and 41 users (82%) buying Office for the Mac.
So all the numbers are valid in this scenario, and yet we have only 10% Mac market share. Therefore, NPD's statements tell us nothing about overall market share.
Corel is correct when it says that the Wordperfect Suite is installed on numerous computers at point of sale.
These numbers just reflect the retail versions. If Apple installed the full version of iWork on all of its machines, the way it used to, with Appleworks, then the numbers would be higher, if these installs were counted, and because more people would be buying a new copy as an upgrade than do now.
But, let's be reasonable. iWork is not a substitute for Office. It seems to be a substitute for Appleworks. And it isn't there yet.
Also, downloading OO doesn't mean that it is being used. I've downloaded all of the major version upgrades, but I just examine them. I don't use them. I know plenty of people on Windows who do the same. 50 million downloads mean nothing. How many people here have downloaded shareware or freeware, used it a few times, and never used it again?
StarOffice has not gained any traction despite being much cheaper per seat. Those numbers cited are suspect.
The same thing is true about the many Linux distro's out there. Many have been downloaded. But how many are actually being used? How many are being used to the exclusion of something else?
How many of those 50 million downloads are of the latest version, and not just upgrades from previous versions? How many are from different people, and not from the same people? And, again, how many are being used on a regular basis, rather than merely being looked at, out of curiosity?
Originally posted by Anders
How many here has iWork and DON`T have Office on their HDs?
*raises hand*
Originally posted by melgross
Those numbers cited are suspect.
How so?
Erwin Tenhumberg, a product marketing manager in Sun's client system group, told the OASIS Adoption Forum in London on Tuesday that OpenOffice.org has been downloaded "close to" 48 million times in the five years since the project was founded. Although this number may include duplicate downloads, the average user of OpenOffice downloads it six times but installs it on nine machines, according to a survey of 5000 people downloading the application that was cited by Tenhumberg.
He also pointed out that this number does not include OpenOffice.org mirror sites or open source CDs and Linux distributions that package the office productivity application.
Disks containing open source software that include OpenOffice have been distributed by a number of governments worldwide, including the Indian government, which is distributing 7 million CDs containing Tamil and Hindi versions of open source applications to the public, and the local government in the French region of Auvergne, which has distributed 64,000 packs of CDs to students.
link
One more link
One more
Another one
Originally posted by Gene Clean
How so?
link
One more link
One more
Another one
Because no one tracks what happens to any of these downloads. This is the biggest problem that has been noted with Open Source as regards to numbers in use. All sorts of claims are being made, but they prove nothing. Even if the Indian government is distributing 7 million copies, it doesn't mean that they will be used. There is no way to tell.
It's the same situation we had a year or so ago, when IDC reported high percentages of Linux adoption in third world countries. What happens, as they acknowledged later, is that these computers are sold with Linux installed. The new buyer sees a person outside the store selling disks with both Windows and Office on them. For a couple of bucks, they buy the disk, and convert the machine to windows.
I've downloaded OO myself, at least four times. Does this mean, according to Tenhumberg, that I have four copies that are being used, rather than the one of the last version, which is NOT being used? 48 million copies downloaded over the last five years, might mean that there are four or five million of the latest version that are actually being used, as well as a couple million of older versions that are being used. The versions that were available more than about two years ago were not usable on a daily basis. How many of the downloads were of those early feature lacking, poorly function-able, versions? Is there any breakdown, the way we can get for commercial versions of software? No, there is not.
What we have, is supposition, and well meaning, but also self-serving number surveys, that tell us little.
Originally posted by Anders
How many here has iWork and DON`T have Office on their HDs?
That would be me. 8)
Originally posted by melgross
Because no one tracks what happens to any of these downloads.
This is a good point. I have downloaded stuff (Open Office is one example in fact) 3-4 times at different times, places and for different reasons and I am presently not using it anywhere or anytime.
Originally posted by Nautical
That would be me. 8)
Me too.
Originally posted by Anders
How many here has iWork and DON`T have Office on their HDs?
I do not have any Microsoft products on my iBook. I only use Windows for programming purposes.
Originally posted by Chris Cuilla
This is a good point. I have downloaded stuff (Open Office is one example in fact) 3-4 times at different times, places and for different reasons and I am presently not using it anywhere or anytime.
Same here. I grab a copy every few months to see how it's coming along, but haven't to date actually *kept* a copy for use. I launch, I scream, I claw my eyes out, I delete. One of these days I'm hoping the cycle will break, but so far... no go.