Much of pre - Expo conjecture surrounding iWork — the productiveness big money announced by Steve Jobs Tuesday as a replacement to the recollective - fallow AppleWorks — painted the upcoming app as a productivity suite to rival Microsoft Office . The reality of iWork , however , turned out to be something far short of an Office - killer . Yes , the suite boast an inspection and repair of Keynote , the presentation diligence that ’s given Microsoft ’s PowerPoint a fairly respectable political campaign for its money . But the other iWork app — a intelligence - processing program called Pages — won’t lead to a jam of Mac users consign Word to the flames of blaze ( or , at least , the scrap can ) any clip soon .
Then again , after amaze a coup d’oeil at Pages during Steve Jobs ’s tonic this sunrise , I ’m not really sure it ’s conjecture to .
Instead , if there ’s one app that Pages seems primed to take out , it ’s a canonical page - layout programme along the lines of PageMaker . Which is commodious and all , what on account of PageMaker already being bushed . After all , the few awkward conversation Apple has to have with its major software suppliers at the next developer conference , the better for all concerned .
This initial impression could commute once iWork actually ships on January 22 , but the program Apple touted Tuesday seemed to put more of an stress on varlet - layout than word - processing . Indeed , in the brief time Jobs and Apple senior vice prexy of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller spent talking up Pages , they focused on the program ’s templates — predesigned menus , brochures , resumes , and other document where all you have to do is swap out the furnish text and images for text and images of your own . genuine , Word provide those sort of templates with its Project Gallery feature of speech , but Pages seems to offer skillful flexibleness and — more important — tighter integration with iLife apps such as iPhoto . Or , at least , it did from my vantage point in Moscone Center .
In fact , rather than act as a competitor to Word , I can see Pages as acomplementto Microsoft ’s Holy Scripture - processing app . Pages is compatible with Word document , so I could very easy see typing up text in Word , importing it over to Pages , and using that broadcast to pretty up the final product .
Of course , some hoi polloi probablycan’tsee doing that — for them , a productiveness retinue without at least a spreadsheet app is not a productivity rooms deserving having . So they ’re potential to take a pass on iWork in favor of some other Office challenger — OpenOSX ’s suite , perhaps , or Write and Calc from Mariner Software . Or they ’re probable to waitress for some next loop of iWork in the hope that it add together an updated version of AppleWorks ’ spreadsheet capableness .
They could be in for a long time lag . It ’s hard for multitude to envision a globe where Apple and Microsoft are’t going at it like true cat and heel , but I think the two companies have long since learned to peacefully co - be and even turn a profit from one another . Apple knows that it take a Mac - compatible Office program to make its platform attractive to a healthy chunk of user — peculiarly those who might be inclined to snatch up Mac miniskirt . And if Microsoft palpate like iWork is tread on its turf , it ’s not letting on . The troupe denote today that it ’s contrive to sum up Spotlight support to Word , Excel , and PowerPoint that will enable OS X 10.4 ’s searching technology to index and search documents from those apps ; that ’s scarcely the actions of a company planning to go off and sulk in its collapsible shelter like Achilles now that Apple has a brand new word - processing programme of its own .
Of all the exposition declaration from Jobs today , iWork seems to have bring forth the most underwhelming response , for the most part because of what it ’s not . Me , I like the app because I ’d rather focus on what it is .
