It’s been amusing to see the reactions to the announcement that iWorks is now going to be free to purchasers of Apple's iKit. Along with the OS being free, this does rather undermine the central plank of Microsoft's business strategy. So, as has been widely reported, we got the wonderful sight of a senior Microsoft exec entirely throwing his teddy out of the pram:
Of course, even with the 720p display I’m using right now, I could easily spot some coverage today that needs to be corrected.
Seems like the RDF (Reality Distortion Field) typically generated by an Apple event has extended beyond Cupertino.
So let me try to clear some things up.
Note: If you are the TL;DR type, let me cut to the chase. Surface and Surface 2 both include Office, the world’s most popular, most powerful productivity software for free and are priced below both the iPad 2 and iPad Air respectively. Making Apple’s decision to build the price of their less popular and less powerful iWork into their tablets not a very big (or very good) deal.
He may be right and he may be wrong but it’s not entirely surprising to see such an argument from such a source. One reason is that Apple were rather goading Microsoft execs:
It’s easy to see why Shaw was on the defensive; while announcing its new products Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took a number of none-too-subtle swipes at Microsoft’s Windows and Office products.
Microsoft was never mentioned by name, but Windows and Office logos were often used as visual aids as Apple execs bemoaned the high prices other companies charge for their operating systems and daily productivity applications.
The thing is, Shaw does have at least a partially valid point to make. While iWorks is indeed now free it is a definite walk back in terms of capability. Especially in the Pages 5 part of it, there’s a number of features that have been left out of it.
The ones I’ve noticed so far are the removal of the ability to see a character count including spaces (something I need when I write for MacFormat), the removal of the status bar and its persistent word count (something I need in almost every document I do), the removal of the ability to change the default zoom level (again, something I need on each document), the ability to select non-contiguous blocks of text. It doesn’t remember if you close the formatting panel, the Autocorrect preferences are gone, the two-page view is gone, the… you get the idea.
That’s from a journalist friend of mine in Scotland: and the point is that those are exactly the sort of features that someone who writes for a living is going to demand from a word processing application. Writing to length is the difficult part of what they (or perhaps we if I’m to be considered one) do.
There’s a 33 page extended conversation about what has changed over on the Apple service boards. Some of it is indeed about what has been added but most people seem a great deal more upset with what has been lost than with what has been gained:
Missing
1. Selecting non-contiguous text gone
2. Outline view appears gone
3. Customizable Toolbar is gone
4. Many templates appear gone
5. Captured pages gone
6. Reorganize pages by dragging gone
7. Duplicate pages gone
8. Subscript/superscript buttons gone
9. Select all instances of a Style is gone
10. Retain zoom level of document gone
11. Facing pages gone12. Endnotes gone
13. Media Inspector can’t find iPhoto library on external drive
14. Update is missing for older installations, Apple is reportedly working on a solution via a redeemable code or update on the ir Support Download site.
This isn’t the first time that seeming upgrades to Apple software seem to have gone backwards:
This isn’t the first time that Apple has seen criticisms from power users over an updated product release. The company was hammered by power users of Final Cut Pro X when it was released in 2011, because a number of essential features were completely missing from the software. Apple offered refunds to unhappy customers and launched a new marketing campaign to win back skeptical users after adding many of the features that were requested.
Some are pretty blunt in their evaluation:
Pages 5: An unmitigated disaster
Dear oh dear. They really have done it, haven’t they? They have taken what had evolved into a rather decent word processor / page layout application and have eliminated so many useful features that it effectively is now a piece of useless junk, and I honestly have no idea for whom this latest version of Pages is intended.
As to why the changes the consensus seems to be conformity between versions:
The reason for the change seems clear. Whenever Apple does a big software revamp like this, it’s in the name of simplification. The new versions of the iWork and iLife apps are designed to be more in tune with their counterparts on iOS. This makes sense given the new sharing capabilities Apple just added, allowing users to start work on one device, like an iPad, and pick it up on, say, a Macbook. But in the pursuit of unity between all of its devices, some features have gotten lost in the shuffle.
The fact that iWork on the Mac has lost functionality isn’t because Apple is blind to power users. It’s because they’re willing to make a short-term sacrifice in functionality so that they can create a foundation that is equal across the Mac, iOS, and web versions. It will take time to bring these new versions of iWork up to parity with what the Mac used to have. In the meantime all platforms have to live with the lowest common denominator.
So yes, iWorks is now free but at the cost of moving back to that lowest common denominator.
via apple - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEwNKMXk5tIIFVykPh0wK0F1Hz5tg&url=http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/10/26/links-26-oct-apples-iworks-may-now-be-free-but-in-many-senses-its-a-step-backwards/
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