Does anyone think apple is planning an office Killer?
Ok so in 2005 iWork came out, and most of us know about the rumored "Numbers". If "Numbers" was added to iWork with Pages and Keynote, would you reckon apple could swoop past Office, in terms of product quality, ease of use and functionality? Is this a possible plan Steve has up his sleeve? If so could it work?
Comments
Originally posted by Ireland
Ok so in 2005 iWork came out, and most of us know about the rumored "Numbers". If "Numbers" was added to iWork with Pages and Keynote, would you reckon apple could swoop past Office, in terms of product quality, ease of use and functionality? Is this a possible plan Steve has up his sleeve? If so could it work?
No. An AppleWorks killer but not an Office killer. Office has to many bells, whistles and features for iWorks to even begin to think about matching let alone overcoming. Microsoft has had twenty years to but Office together and iWorks is just an infant.
Office is a huge, huge suite. Most people have no idea on what it can do and use only a little bit of it. But it can do most everything and is thus the product of choice for most businesses. Besides the "I know nothing" IT departments are so scared of it that they will not even look at anything else. -- And for professional work and products, I chose Office over iWorks. And I have both.
Hell I'm ok with that just give me a iWork with a full functional spreadsheet, database and beefed up drawing tools and I think you have a nice complement to Office.
I'm not sure why anyone would want an office killer. It was one of the first, and has been one of the best programs for the Mac. I just hope MS makes a full-featured version of Office 2007 for the Mac. Pages is not so much a WP as it is a page layout program. It competes more with Publisher, and not very well at that. If Apple applied themselves, they could make a decent competitor to Publisher. But I see no evidence of that happening. Apple can no more make an Office killer than MS can make an iPod killer.
But yes, Microsoft Office is a decent product. I don't get all the bashing of it.
A simple thing like wrapping text to page is beyond Pages.
I'd like you to elaborate, since Pages's wrapping features actually work a lot nicer than Words, in my limited experience.
I run OpenOffice on my PC (bleh!), and it's stable, with hardly any bugs. There also seem to be loads of features and seamless support for MS documents.
David.
Originally posted by iMacfan
Don't you think that OpenOffice and NeoOffice, when they come out for intel (which should be pretty soon) will take a huge chunk out of Microsoft's sales?
It's a decent clone, but, in my experience, far more aggravating to use, with a less innovative user interface. I don't like most of Microsoft's user interface experimentations, but at least they're doing them at all. Almost everyone in the open source camp just seems to be copying Apple's and Microsoft's ideas, rather than researching and testing by themselves.
There also seem to be loads of features and seamless support for MS documents.
Seamless? Hardly, though that isn't OOo's fault, but Microsoft's.
Another thing: it can't even make business cards. It takes like 20 steps or something. It should have an easier template or way of doing. That's just one example. People always say Office can do a lot, and perhaps has too many features, and is really powerful. Oh yeah? Simplicity/ease of use is power. If it takes 20 steps to do stuff like business cards...it sucks.
IF Apple made an Office suite, I feel it would probably be better. I mean eventually I think Keynote will be better than PowerPoint.
Originally posted by Aquatic
I mean eventually I think Keynote will be better than PowerPoint.
I've no experience with Powerpoint at all. Why is it better than Keynote IYO?
Originally posted by Aquatic
I have to say, Word is kind of a piece of shit. Page layout? ...
I have a slightly different take on Microsoft's productively (or is it anti-productivity) apps), particularly Word. The true essence of a Mac was captured back in the 1990's with the tagline: The Power to be Your Best. A good Mac app gets out of the user's way and allows the user's skill and creativity to run free. Microsoft apps prefer to take the reins while the user watches, assuming responsibility for formatting options that it is simply not good at. You either disable all of its automatic formatting, leave them enabled and wrestle with them, or you give up and accept a crappy document.
For all of its feature bloat, Word does not allow me to create better-looking documents than I created back in 1991 when I bought my first Mac. Back in 1992, I did dual-column, multiple-choice exams with texbook-quality illustrations and math equations using that wonderful but defunct app FullWrite Pro. Fourteen years later, I can do as well with Word, but not better or as satisfying.
If you want to see an adult break down and cry, talk to a legal secretary who has to use Word after learning the craft on WordPerfect.
Originally posted by Aquatic
#1: text doesn't resize on the fly. I don't know how this got past 1.0.1.
I'd appreciate if you could elaborate.
I just created a simply text object, pressed cmd-T to open the font panel, and tried its slider to change sizes. It's on-the-fly indeed, very smoothly so.
However, I'm guessing you mean something else. Resizing while a presentation is playing, perhaps?
PowerPoint has gotten much better, now that Keynote kicked them in the butt a bit, but Keynote raised the bar muchly for them, and they're still working to get there. I
Excel is... well, it's the best thing out there right now. Unfortunately, it killed off several much superior competitors over the years. It's a klunky, awful UI that wouldn't pass beta stages now, but we're stuck with it because 'well everyone knows it already'. Bleah. Functionally, it does okay.
What we need is a replacement for Access. A nice, simple, easy to use CoreData based DB app, please. I'd take that over a spreadsheet tool, to be honest.
But the worst part of Office, hands-down... the UI. Simply that, the UI. It's unorganized, ill-thought-out, and generally a mess.
So much so, that apparently MS couldn't realize that the problem wasn't that they were using menus, as that they were using menus *incorrectly*... so now we get 'ribbons'. Bleah. Modal toolbars. Great idea that.
Originally posted by Kickaha
What we need is a replacement for Access. A nice, simple, easy to use CoreData based DB app, please. I'd take that over a spreadsheet tool, to be honest.
That would be too logical/rational for Apple.
Seriously, Apple develops CoreImage, CoreVideo, CoreData, Spotlight, and we've only seen half-ass implementations of these technologies. Granted, CoreImage and CoreVideo are being implemented in many more apps these days (iLife) but we haven't seen many apps using CoreData outside pro apps like Aperture. And iTunes, which is the perfect candidate for Spotlight and CoreImage effects, hasn't seen these added to it (if ever considering Apple's pigheadedness at trying to keep the Mac version as shitty as the Windows version).
Originally posted by Kickaha
....
What we need is a replacement for Access. A nice, simple, easy to use CoreData based DB app, please. I'd take that over a spreadsheet tool, to be honest.
....
Huh! I agree with everything you said, but this. We can't get a replacement for Access because we don't have Access in the first place. That M$ POS is available only for Windows. Mac users have several superior alternatives to the Microsoft offering. The cross-platform FileMaker family from the Apple subsidiary of the same name is most popular. 4th Dimension revolutionized DBMS on the Mac. OpenBase ships with Xtools at the low, low price of $0.00. Need I say more?
Originally posted by Mr. Me
Huh! I agree with everything you said, but this. We can't get a replacement for Access because we don't have Access in the first place. That M$ POS is available only for Windows.
"We need a replacement for Access, as that's a piece of Office on Windows that many users whine they don't get on the Mac, and it's a reason for them not to switch."
Better?
Quote:
Mac users have several superior alternatives to the Microsoft offering. The cross-platform FileMaker family from the Apple subsidiary of the same name is most popular.
Too pricey for consumer use.
Quote:
4th Dimension revolutionized DBMS on the Mac.
Ditto.
Quote:
OpenBase ships with Xtools at the low, low price of $0.00.
Er, Tenon's Xtools? $99. Or are you talking about Apple's Dev Tools? *pokes around* not seeing it... Besides, isn't that just Yet Another Engine, like MySQL or SQLite? Needs a UI.
Quote:
Need I say more?
Yeah, point me to a sub-$50 database app with a flexible UI that I can configure without needing Interface Builder.
Originally posted by kim kap sol
Seriously, Apple develops CoreImage, CoreVideo, CoreData, Spotlight, and we've only seen half-ass implementations of these technologies. Granted, CoreImage and CoreVideo are being implemented in many more apps these days (iLife) but we haven't seen many apps using CoreData outside pro apps like Aperture. And iTunes, which is the perfect candidate for Spotlight and CoreImage effects, hasn't seen these added to it (if ever considering Apple's pigheadedness at trying to keep the Mac version as shitty as the Windows version).
Don't forget that
1) Motion predates CoreImage/CoreVideo, yet essentially is a fantastic implementation of the same idea. (I'm not sure, of course, which of the two was internally first ?_the app, or the frameworks. I assume they were developed in parallel, or maybe during Motion development, Apple realized they could export the technology and allow third parties to use it.)
2) iTunes is Carbon and doesn't have easy access to much of the Cocoa goodness, especially not for the Windows port, which, as you point out, needs feature parity for marketing reasons.
Originally posted by Kickaha
But the worst part of Office, hands-down... the UI. Simply that, the UI. It's unorganized, ill-thought-out, and generally a mess.
So much so, that apparently MS couldn't realize that the problem wasn't that they were using menus, as that they were using menus *incorrectly*... so now we get 'ribbons'. Bleah. Modal toolbars. Great idea that.
Well, I argued the same, but Kevin Schofield of Microsoft Research disagrees.
Perhaps it's good that Microsoft experiments around a lot with new ideas. I don't agree that the ribbon is a particularly good one, but if Microsoft can't (and perhaps they can? they did, after all, get rid of most instances of Microsoft Agent, e.g. Clippy), at least third parties can learn from Microsoft's negative ideas/experimentations/experiences.
Originally posted by Kickaha
...
Er, Tenon's Xtools? $99. Or are you talking about Apple's Dev Tools? *pokes around* not seeing it...
...
My bad. I meant Xcode. FWIW, OpenBase should have been installed when you installed the Development Tools. If not, you can find it on the OpenBase.com website.