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Apple's Rumored Office Suite
Several anonymous readers noted that the mac rumor mill is churning already with news for the upcoming MacWorld. The current rumor is a new office suite to replace the incredibly dated AppleWorks and incredibly bloated and slow MS Office.
...to replaced the incredibly dated Apple Works and incredibly expensive,bloated and slow MS Office.
I think the submitter has an axe to grind. I have been quite impressed with Word on OSX, and indeed the rest of the available Office suite. I would prefer to use OpenOffice, but I feel it has a little longer to mature on OSX.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
... a better port of OpenOffice? Last I checked (admittedly about a year) there was a working port, but it required installing X11 and a few other "non-Macish" actions before it would work. Could they be better off just "fixing" it ?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
This rumor seems to make a lot of sense. If Apple were building a new office suite from the ground up it would take a while to do and would explain why AppleWorks say there and played dead for years. Most of the AppleWorks team has probably been working on writing the new office suite and a few people left working on AppleWorks updates and fixes. Also I can see this suite taking a while as Apple would want it to work very intuitively, something that Office frequently fails at and AppleWorks rarely shines at. There are so many formatting options and other tools that to build a really good word processor a complete re-think needs to be done on how the interface is organized. Right now its a nearly endless array of menus and sub-menus. Let's hope Apple does a good job of cleaning up the mess.
People need to realize that making a successful Office competitor doesn't equate to making it less "bloated and slow", or adding any sort of all-important feature set.
The only way any product in this space is going to go places is if it works just like Office, acts just like Office, feels just like Office, etc. Office is the standard, and for 99% of people that use it, it's flawless. Any deviation from this standard suite, even if it's an improvement, is nothing but a nuisance to the average user.
A common user seeing one single glitch (glitch defined as something different from how it works in Office) will run (not walk) to their standard MS Office icons.
How do I know this is true? Simple. There are tons of people who are actually into the OSS movement, love Slashdot, run Linux servers, run OS X, etc. that *still* run MS Office when they can run OpenOffice instead? Why is that? It's because even the most open-minded of us are creatures of habit. And if *these* people are resistant, imagine how the masses are.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
It's not a new office suite, it's an application called Pages that will be bundled in with Keynote to make a new suite of applications called iWork (to complement iLife). There's no word of a spreadsheet application for example.
If the rumour is true (and Think Secret have been very accurate over the past couple of years) then bundling all this software along with the $500 Mac is a great move for them. 1.25Ghz G4 might not sound like much, but it's faster than the last generation iMac I have, and it's already fast enough for the majority of computer users (those who surf, do email, write some letters and take pictures from their digital cameras). Combined with all the software these users are likely to need, it's a great price.
It is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?
There are really two classes of users that need ``office'' software.
At the low end, you have most home users and students. Most of this group just needs basic wordprocessing and spreadsheet functionality. The most advanced feature would really need to be spellcheck.
At the high end, you have the business users who use a lot of the advanced features like revision tracking, charting, scheduling, etc.
I'm not really sure one suite can cover both audiences.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
If this iWorks isn't 100%--and I mean 100%--compatible with Office, forget it. And is Apple making the right strategic move, here? One of the reasons that folks even contemplate moving from Windows to OS X, instead of, say, Linux, is that you can buy Microsoft Office for OS X.
If MS feels threatened by iWorks, they'll just kill Office for OS X. And then Apple has lost one of their best marketing reasons to go Mac instead of Linux.
Not that Keynote really caused any problems--but iWord is a different story. Maybe this is just so Apple can have a "professional grade" office suite to put on the their pro line, and if you need Office compatibility (like 95% of the world) you buy Office for the Mac? But it would save that other 5% $500.
I guess I don't see the wisdom of this.
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$tar -xvf
That OperOffice.org runs under X11 on OS X is enough reason not to use it for 98% of the people out there. It can't even use native menus and widgets, for Pete's sake.
I love that I can run The GIMP and friends through X11 on my Mac, but there's no way in hell I'd call it "perfectly good". X11 on Mac is adequate--enough to get the job done, but little more than that. I'll take native apps over X11 any day of the week.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Apple's new word processing software had been rumored to be called Document, but sources say it appears that name has been abandoned, possibly due to the confusion a user might encounter when being told "this document is a Document document."
:)
This brings to mind MS's annoying habit of calling things by generic names (Movie Maker, SQL Server, Word, Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc.). I wish they'd knock it off... it can really screw up a Google search, both for MS and non-MS products. They should stick with names like Excel and Powerpoint, and Apple should not pick up this habit. Call it iWriter or something. Hell, why not OOWriter
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Other replies to the parent identify the significant issues with OO on the Mac. Having tried for a year to rely on it for word processing, I finally gave up and switched to Mellel--a fine tool for a number of things, but not nearly as muscular as either OO or MS-O. The poor shell integration and reliance on X caused more frustration for me than using it was worth.
That said, OO is a fine product in it's Win and Lin incarnations, and I personally would prefer Apple to fully fund a team dedicated to properly porting the darn thing to Aqua, as opposed to rolling their own from scratch. There is a somewhat beleaguered dev trying to do the job, but they need lots of help. Some developers and cash would make their lives a lot easier.
A funded porting team would also benefit from being able to use the work of the OO core team in dealing with the always-vexing "catch up" issues such as managing the MS format changes, in turn letting the port team focus on making the OO updates play nice in Aqua. Less work for them, quicker updates for the user community.
(Not that Steve gives an expresso shot for what I think, but, hey, I can hope... )
Perhaps so. These are philosophical and sociological considerations, and outside the arguments over any relative technical and human-interface merit of the software in question.
As an aside of my own - I often need "flashy' presentations to compensate for the lacking attention span of those with the fat wallets, not the lacking of my content.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?
Yep. Because when Apple does it, the end user sees a benefit. When Microsoft does it, their market share increases. There was no logical reason to integrate the entire browser into the OS like it was in Windows 9x. The proper and better way is to embed an API, and put a browser out that works off that, like how OS X (Safari) and 2000/XP do it. Remember how in 98 IE crashes could make the taskbar disappear?
The integration between the iLife apps is a great example of good integration. On the Windows side, Movie Maker ignores Windows Media Player to find music, and the photo stuff in the OS is horrible and can't be turned into a movie slideshow easially.
Well, page numbers would be nice, too. And real control over your margins. And footnotes. And mail merge. And maybe headers and footers. Multi-columns would be nice. Okay, so maybe it needs *just* a bit more than tables. But tables would be nice, too.
ScienceSeeker.org
Oh come on now!
You can't say MS's office integration doesn't work, or that it merely ticks a box on some notional feature list.
The level integration and interoperability of the Office suite is something that most other software vendors aspire to, but few (if any) have achieved.
It's not an easy thing to acomplish. Which is why MS Office is as popular on the Mac platform as it is on Wintel.
I think embracing and extending Open Office (or even open-sourcing their custom app) would be a better move for Apple. Right now, it is difficult for many businesses to replace PCs with Macs because of Office. The Office version for Mac is more limitted and has some performance and interoperability problems. The only way Apple could break that monoploly would be to release a competing office suite (preferably for free) that runs well on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
The real advantage to that would be to make a Mac the logical upgrade for businesses. They are not a software company, and software is a difficult place to build value right now. Keep the software open, and sell the hardware.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
If Apple also comes on board, this would help a lot in creating a true office standard-format (for the first time in computing history, until now we just have fluctuating quasi-standards set by whatever version of whatever office suite happens to be in the most widest use) benefit everybody except Microsoft.
I will be able to read OASIS-documents in 20 years, but I have my doubts about MSOffice documents...
That's odd, I thought I just did.
I'm not really sure what you mean here. What do you allege Microsoft Office interoperates with? I haven't noticed that it operates very well with other vendors software, or that it even operates very well with different versions of itself. As for integration, it seems to be a middling effort, at best. The total integration, between both the office suite elements and between the suite and the OS, seems to be stuck at the level achieved by other vendors back around 1995.
Gosh, and I thought that illegal bundling arrangements and abuse of monopoly power might have had something to do with it. I realize that I hold and unpopular opinion, and that all right-thinking computer users recognize Microsoft for the innovative and benevolent capitalist they are, but I guess I just like being an iconoclast and a parriah.
I taught word processing and basic PC skills to paralegals in the 90's. In spite of Word's increasing popularity, many law offices stayed with WordPerfect. Here's what I saw happen:
Law offices adopted WordPerfect because its style sheets and macro features matured before Word's. In a business that produces massive numbers of identically-formatted documents, with many passages repeated from doc-to-doc, robust stylesheets and macros were a powerful selling point.
WordPerfect's keystroke shortcuts were also critical to its success in the law field. Most of the typing in law offices was done by secretaries, who were professional typists. They didn't want thier fingers to leave the keyboard for any reason. And they certainly didn't want to have to wait for a menu to pop up or pull down, and then navigate through that menu (even if they could do so without leaving the keyboard). WordPerfect enabled these professional typists to do everything with keyboard shortcuts only, and bypass slower menus. WordPerfect was to legal secretaries what emacs is to programmers.
Third-party vendors saw the dominance of WordPerfect in the legal profession, and developed thier products around WordPerfect. Whether it was an add-on to produce legal citations more easily, or templates for legal documents, they further supported WordPerfect's dominance in this specialized market.
After spending years developing thier WordPerfect reflexes, integrating third party products, and even writing thier own WordPerfect macros, legal typists were not going to easily abandon the application. So while most of the rest of the world switched to Word, the legal profession has kept on chugging away with WordPerfect. And now every lawyer I know still uses it.
User Training for Busy Programmers
Here's how Apple could be successful even without MS Office
If the rumors about a robust Apple office suite are true, and I'm pretending I'm Steve Jobs, I'm guessing Apple will continue to work in and around the OS community as IBM has done (and Apple has already done so far).
Apple has learned quite a bit about the open source community by now, after their experiences with Darwin/Mac OS X and KHTML/Safari. The use of open standards is prevalent throughout the bundled applications (Mail -> mbox; Address Book -> vcard; iCal -> icalendar, etc.). Apple should continue this trend with their office suite.
Make the interface irresistible. They have already shown how to do it with ClarisWorks (I never used AppleWorks, but CW 4 was a thing of integrated beauty). They have shown the ability to put great power in simple packages. iTunes. Garage Band. iPhoto. Personally, I have never liked Word's interface (even on the Mac), but there's not a lot of choice. Bring on a contender with a fresh face, and Word's 20-year-old baggage (elements from 1984 are still there -- where's the fscking Font menu!?) will suddenly look very ugly.
Read Word documents reasonably well. Write them perfectly. All translation leaves something to be desired. I don't believe that it is necessary for a Word contender to be 100% feature compatible with Word. It absolutely needs to get styles, sections, margins, tables, footnotes, endnotes, and graphics right, though. A spreadsheet program needs to duplicate the function set of Excel (though not necessarily the syntax; q.v.) It needs to be 100% right for the features that 80% of the people use. Word won not because of its interface, but because people are locked into its format. Break the format and you break the biggest barrier to alternate office contenders. Perhaps this will require work with Open Office developers. That substep should happen no matter what, if only for the following point.
Make the format an open standard. Let anyone write an app to read or write Apple Office documents. This is the corollary to the point above. Don't give people reasons to fear switching to or from your app. Give them the ability to change their mind. That's a feature; people will buy it.
Don't imitate Office Seriously. Do something new. Give people a jump start on new ideas and possibilities. Make everything wiki-like. Docs on the network should be sharable. Build a Subversion repository into every document or home folder.Extend it to every OS X server. Build on the embeddable parts idea from OpenDoc (and semi-executed in CW). Instead of a spreadsheet program, build a full-featured spreadsheet on top of a robust, professional RAD environment with an open API. Let regular people be developers again (whatever happened to HyperCard?).
Buy Omni Group. Or take notes. Or just give them money to continue developing fantastic software. OmniWeb, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle are all head-of-class programs. Graffle could easily be part of an Office Pro suite. Especially if you can build and take snapshots of SQL tables like Visio.
IBM is building its business on enterprise open source software like Linux. Apple should continue the progress they have made in the direction of doing the same for personal computing apps.