Apple Making a Spreadsheet?

Raleel writes "It appears that apple has trademarked the word "Numbers". Speculation is that it is a new spreadsheet. It makes sense with Keynote, Pages, and Mail." That would sort of fill in the last major hole in their lineup.

Comments

Re:Patenting a _word_?

[EccentricAnomaly]

How the heck can anyone get away with trademarking a common word?

You mean like: Apple?

Not enough, not comparable

[tlambert]

Not enough, not comparable.

The "real" Microsoft Office Professional has:
o Access
o Excel
o Outlook
o PowerPoint
o Publisher
o Word

Even if Apple does a spreadsheet, that's not going to be enough. The major deployment for Office in small to medium businesses is with MS Access and a bunch of Visual BASIC/VBScript glue to turn it into vertical market custom software.

I know several people who run multimillion dollar financial services businesses, each of which is under 100 employees, and their collections applications, reporting applications, etc., are all based on this model to glue things together.

If you try to buy discounted paper - e.g. you are into factor financing, or you are dealing with a Fannie May or Freddie Mac paper, or subprime credit (face it: that's most of the people trying to get credit in the first place), etc. - then you are likely in this category. Even if you aren't, the data comes from companies like Credit Suisse First Boston, Chase Manhattan, Banc Of America, etc., on CDROMs in access database or Excel spreadsheet data formats.

The thing that would switch these people over to Macintosh (don't kid yourself, many of these people want to switch - their employees are just as likely as the next huys to surf the web and end up with spyware out the wazoo) is the ability to run all the same scripts and custom code (all of it interpreted) as they can on their Windows workstation. I know at least three companies that would switch in an instant, but who aren't willing to do so now because they don't want to have to invest in something they can't make minor changes to themselves without learning how to be a programmer. Or keeping a programmer on staff full time.

And that's just one vertical market.

You can find the same issues with document storage and retrieval systems that use optical scanning to get out from under paper. You can also find the same thing with medical billing systems, and Doctors office management systems. Many insurance companies have specific client requirements for integration with their networks for electronic billing and payment processing: if you don't do it using their app., then you get to fill out paper, and they get to it when they get to it.

The deck is seriously stacked, and it's the compatibility of the database and the inter-application scripting, not the spreadsheets, which keeps Windows entrenched. It's no mistake that neither Access or the full VisualBASIC suite has made it to platforms other than Windows.

-- Terry

Re:The Numbers Game:

[Pfhorrest]

Yes, exactly! And Pages made me realize why I have always disliked things like Word and other "word processors"...

They're really a bastard category of products. They're text editors pretending to be page layout programs... or page layout programs pretending to be text editors. The whole concept has always seemed somehow *wrong* to me. Kludgy and awkward.

Pages fixes that. It fills in the same category as things like Word, but goes about things in a sane way. Apple has a text editor already - TextEdit. It's pervasive across the OS X system, and technically I'm using it right now in this Safari text box. Pages is a page layout program that calls on TextEdit (I presume) to do its text functions, QuickTime to handle its graphics functions, and so on. The components are handled by system functions that handle those components well; Pages just puts them all together in a pretty, integrated package.

It's a lot like XHTML+CSS versus the old content-and-layout-in-one kludge that was earlier HTML standards, actually.