re enterprise swapping
But I find it hard to believe big corporate installs would consider swapping out the mission-critical MS Office suite for Apple's iWork
While there are some Apple products that I think make interesting fodder for discussion of enterprise plays, I don't think iWork is there yet by any stretch. I was thinking that the home user, who hasn't got a site license, might benefit from a family pack that does Mac and Win and will support him as he transitions at home. This idea could be applied to the single-seat license that would install on either Mac or Win with the same key. The home user might have less need for some of the things iWork won't be able to do by the next version or two, and might accept iWork as a good-looking and affordable alternative to costly MS word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet tools. I'm guessing that by next version, Numbers will suck less. Most home users don't make documents with the features that make me wail at Pages, and Pages output should be prettier (or at least, closer to what you thought you were getting).
The Unix theory of applications, that tools should do one thing and do it well, is reflected in Apple's separate calendar and email apps; the Leopard behavior of letting folks select dates in emails for making calendar events is a good way to patch up the separateness. It's worth pointing out that Apple did not go this way with iTunes: it was a jukebox with an electronic video accompaniment (remember that demo? that was a real feature when it was bought from Cassaday & Greene (sp? RIP.)) and it encoded your CDs, but now it's the synch tool for portable players and an online music store and a tool for downloading your school's lectures and it activates your phone and ensures your email and contacts synchronize and soon it will sell you software ... oh, it already sells software for iPods, and soon it will sell software for your phone and the iPod Touch too .... It's obvious one can have "success" with either the monolithic (iTunes) approach, or with the specialist approach (Apple's pro apps aren't one big monolithic juggernaut with a zillion plug-ins, they are a film editor, a DVD encoder, a film clip library, etc.; and Keynote's progress shows Apple can make tools useful, and I'm hopeful that the disgrace that is a big Pages document is straightened out eventually and that Numbers will be re-issued in time in a form that will allow real datasets to be crunched in it). It's not obvious that Apple's tools are fit to be called specialists yet, as you ably point out.
I have some concern about web apps, but perhaps those concerns will be fixed by improvements in offline tools to enable web apps to continue behaving (and saving, etc.) when people are unable to connect (or unwilling: battery life, data security, etc.). I didn't buy iWork because I was keep to send money to Apple, but because I like having slick presentations and Keynote and iLife made this really feasible, while traveling, on the fly, with heinous time constraints. I'm hopeful that Apple's revenues convince Apple further development and improvement is warranted.
Clearly Apple's energies have been directed to the iPhone platform and the core OS. Frankly, it's hard to see the roadmap for web services (.Mac), iWork and iLife. Doesn't seem to be much vision or strategy there.
I'm with you here, at least partway. I don't see what Apple hopes to offer with dotMac other than remote prefs synching and remote backup for some miniscule fraction of what people create, and my experience with dotMac years ago was that backup just ate the dirt under the horse's excrement and did it with bad mayo. I think Apple has a nice little business getting people with more cash than savvy to pay for super-slow-delivered email, and as a shareholder I can sorta almost respect that, except that I have this inkling that Apple should really be building a quality image everywhere it raises the flag, and I don't think dotMac is it. For this reason I was pissed at Apple over the behavior of Pages on 50-page documents. They should have called it "Page" to make sure you didn't think the tool was suitable for multi-page documents. My slight experience with Numbers is that while I was able to make it do some of the simple things I make Excel do, it did these things sloooowly. I have a copy of Office:Mac 2004 (with the cheap Texas $20 or so license, it's legal, but it was cheaper than iWork) or so on this same iMac G5, and it seems snappy in comparison to what Apple delivers atop its own OS.
I think iLife has an important role to play in getting folks' gadgets attached to their computer. My camera is worth more because of a working version of iPhoto. My iPod wouldn't be worth much without good synching with my music. I would not bother to own a video camera if not for iMovie's power to allow me to make something viewable and fun out of the great mass of stuff that one collects when the green light is blinking. I think iLife should continue in this way, offering a free-with-every-Mac tool that makes the Mac the center of gravity for all the household electronic gadgets. This was a great strategy. Watching me edit movies on the Mac sold a client a Mac, and it also sold me my next video camera.
I think iWork is a work in progress. Apple knows there's demand for presentation software, and Jobs thinks .ppt is uuuugly. Jobs is right-on in this. Therefore, I expect Keynote to get the most attention. However, Pages ... needs serious help. Numbers is, so far, a toy -- though I will make a point to experiment with table/graph functions to see if I can spice up presentations with its output. I think the prospect of linking Numbers and Keynote to allow beautiful and interactive presentations might have possibilities, for example. But mostly Apple needs to get some folks who make documents for a living -- maybe they should scare folks out of the legal department to give feedback the next time they need to make a brief -- to demand the features real users need. Apple needs some users who really hammer the tools to give feedback. I think one reason Apple's dev tools have gotten better is that they are used by folks who demand a lot from them inside Apple, and the company can churn out improvements that make users' lives better. Apple needs to direct this attention to its revenue-generating applications that it is making from scratch, and not just the ones it bought feature-complete and about which it's been reading $999-buyers' comments on what they would like the next time they buy a seat license (or ten).
I think Apple's OS work has been great for Apple -- and it will continue to give Apple an edge as Apple switches iPhone architectures (users may never notice), and as Apple moves to increasingly newer Intel hardware in its main line of computers (though as units increase in iPhones, Apple may end up shipping more MacOS in phones and iPod Touch units than it does in computers ... does it already), Apple will be able to push those benefits through to users via its work in run-time-linked libraries that will keep improving underneath all the shipping apps from all the developers on the platform. I don't think Apple will be able, without threatening its hardware sales, to offer an OS as a stand-alone product outside the upgrade environment, and I think Apple is therefore unlikely to do this soon. Thus, Apple's software sales business seems to depend on getting right things like iLife (also an upgrade), iWork (which gets better as its components get better, and as integration with other tools gets better), and even that old dog I gave up on years ago, dotMac. I'm not sure what Apple really could offer with dotMac (multiple machine pref synching? Is that really cool? I know some developers who have taken advantage of it, but do any users?), but for one I'd sped up that glacial mail delivery. It gives Macs a bad name in servers :P
Tex, I like the direction you're thinking, and your speculation on Safari as trojan horse for Cocoa on Win is interesting.
I sure would like to think someone in Apple has a plan to make good on this. I don't see it soon, of course; what would Apple offer now? iLife is all tied into drivers and OS-level functions and performance and Apple would drown in support headaches because folks' drivers for their cameras aren't working with their such-and-such OS version on their so-and-so motherboard and the thus-and-so controller chipset. iWork isn't ready to be shown to any non-fans, except Keynote is pretty (but how will its performance be on Win? Usable? Does Keynote depend on an OS that prioritizes certain things in ways Apple's Cocoa DLLs might not be able to ensure on Windows?). Apple doesn't want to make pro apps available on Windows, it wants to sell Macs, and most of that stuff was bought from Win developers and won't run in Cocoa anyway, it's all Carbon.
Oooh, there's a thought. With 64-bit UI all being Cocoa, what will become of the pro apps Apple bought from third parties? Will iTunes go Cocoa? Final Cut? Will they stay 32-bit and lag in performance because Intel's 32-bit setup has fewer registers and thus worse performance? Will Apple have to lead the way on Cocoa-izing old apps, or will Apple demonstrate to the world it's not worth eating the proffered dish?
Curiouser and curiouser.
Take care,
--Tex.
PS anyone care to guess where Safari-related Google search revenue shares might show up on Apple's financial statements? It'd be nice to be able to track how significant this revenue is. Particularly as iPhone users seem to dominate web use, it may be that Google and other search referral revenues become a meaningful revenue stream over time. Measuring this, of course, requires knowing where to look ....
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