While waiting to get my Keynote 2 question answered, I got a demo of Pages, Apple's new word processor. I had a rather dim view of it after seeing the keynote. Well, let me say this - I came away from the in-person demo much more impressed. During Steve's demo, he emphasized how you could use Apple's templates to make slick looking documents. That's great and all, but templates are usually constraining with their boilerplateness. So, I asked the Apple employee who demo'd Pages to me a series of questions about modifying styles, creating templates, and modifying templates.
And I'm happy to report that it appears to be super-easy to do all of the above. And from what I saw, you shouldn't be fooled by what some in the press are saying -- namely that Microsoft word has nothing to fear from Pages. I would say that MS has a lot to fear. There are some really high-end things that I'm sure that Word does better than Pages. But based upon the kick-ass demo that I saw, Pages may be the first word processor to give Word some competition. Well, other than Word itself, of course. :)
-Andy.
Posted by andyr at January 13, 2005 12:41 AMKey question to which the answer is probably yes:
Is pages seamlessly compatible with Word? Not that I'm an apologist for Word or anything but if there's any pain in opening a Pages doc in Word or visa versa, it's going to hurt Page's market share. That's part of what's keeping all the open source word clones down.
Is there a version of this for sale for the Windows platform? I couldn't tell from skimming the product page (which looks pretty slick). Unless users can buy it for Windows, this really isn't going to compete with Word in any meaningful way. Even if it completely displaces MS Office on the Apple platform, that'll only kill ~4% of MS's dominance in that field.
I truly hope that it's released cross-platform. The competition would be good for everyone. Everyone except for the competitors that is :)
Posted by: Mark at January 13, 2005 6:33 AMApple has never entered the PC market to sell software and I don't think it ever will. iTunes was distributed in order to make the ipod work (and it was a smart thing to do), but competing with office is a whole new story. There are a lot of programs that depend on Office's programming model - you'll be surprised at how many companies have reams and reams of "code" that runs in Excel. Apple would have to support a lot of this in a big way in order to start stealing market share.
OTOH, people don't have a large investment in powerpoint, other than their presentations. This is a lower hanging fruit to grab. Sure enough, there will be people with other embedded office stuff in their Powerpoints, but I'll make a wild gut call and say that these are the minority.
This is the kind of thing I don't understand about Apple. The cost of porting already written code for Pages seems to me to be a small fraction of the cost or writing it in the first place. By releasing it to the PC market, they could recoup those costs in a flash and start getting Apple converts. I know it isn't going to grab 50% of Word's market share or even touch the people who write Word and XL "programs", but if it only took a few percentage points, they will basically double their profits and plant the seeds for expanded market share.
Why they wouldn't do this is beyond me. Perhaps porting the code is more costly than I imagine. Perhaps they don't want to "dilute their brand" or some other such nonsense. The only other reason I can think of is some sort of elitism but that's just foolish and I doubt that's the case. I really wish they would give MS Office an honest run for their money. In the end, it would force both suites to improve. With Apple's limp wristed approach to competition, the status-quo is much more comfortable for MS.
Mark,
Apple does say that Page supports reading and writing to Word documents. I didn't test this while I was at the show, however. I suspect that interacting with Word documents in Pages is just like interacting with Word documents in other applictions like AbiWord, OpenOffice, and Word Perfect. It will work, you'll be able to read all of the text and objects and everything -- but there will probably be little glitches that make the translations less than perfect.
Regarding porting Pages to Windows, I don't think that will ever happen. While there are some technical reasons (Pages seems to be using a lot of the MacOS X API's like Quartz, in order to do a lot of it's graphical tricks). But aside from that, Apple is a hardware company. They're in business to sell hardware, and software like Pages is how they attract people to their platform. Consider the gaming consoles. In the console world, the battle is for the "platform exclusive" titles -- those that you can only get for Playstation, GameCube, or XBox. These are the games that sell consoles, not the ones that are available on every platform.
-Andy.
Posted by: Andrew Reitz at January 13, 2005 7:53 PMBesides that, porting software to a new platform is not only about the code. There is a lot more that goes into it the most important one being the fact that you now have to support your customers on this platform. Support costs are the single biggest problem for software development companies - not development itself, as you might expect. Which means that you'd do a lot better supporting your software on one platform rather than two (even though the development costs of the new platform are insignificant, the support costs are very high). Finally, if you have no support costs whatsoever (Linux), you should make a point to proliferate to as many platforms as possible limited only by what your compiler will support and how many #ifdefs in your code you can stomach.
It all make sense... the cost is support NOT development.
the cost is support NOT development.
Right, but isn't that cost rolled into the price of the software? I'm not suggesting that apple release pages for free for windows. If you buy pages for say $50, I would assume that $5 would be for porting, $15 for support, $5 for packaging and shipping, $10 for advertising and the rest as profit. That's all made up of course but if they sell enough copies, they've got the cost of support automatically covered. Then I guess it's a question of whether or not you can predict what the support costs will be. If the phones are ringing off the hook because no one can find clippy, then that $15 probably won't do it.
But like Andy says, if they release the cool software to the proletariats, they loose demand for their expensive and soothing hardware. That I totally understand. But the way apple sells hardware is a little different than Nintendo or the others. With game consoles, they do the Gillette thing and sell the hardware at a loss. The real money is in the games just like with razors or popcorn.
Apple have focused most of their efforts on bringing PC users to the Mac, so it'd be foolish to start porting software over, as that's a large reason PC users switch. We've been aching for something to give Word a run for it's money, and they've answered our calls.
Besides, you seen iTunes for Windows? It just doesn't produce the same results as the Mac version.
Posted by: Jamie at January 24, 2005 7:34 AM