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

The Numbers Game:

[TripMaster Monkey]

From TFS:

That would sort of fill in the last major whole [sic] in their lineup.

Errant homonyms aside, this seems to make a lot of sense...after all, Apple is just a spreadsheet shy of an office suite...although between M$ Office and Open Office, I find myself wondering why they're even bothering...

Also, wasn't there an Apple spreadsheet program previously...called 'grid' or something? I seem to recall something along those lines...perhaps 'Numbers' isn't a spreadsheet after all. The assumption that 'Numbers' is in fact a spreadsheet is only speculation, after all.

Re:The Numbers Game:

[CdBee]

A Sun executive announced about 3 years ago that Apple had hired engineers to work at Sun on StarOffice (OpenOffice + commercial addins) for OSX, and that this product would shortly be announced and be shipped with new Macs

The same guy was sent about a week later to deny that it was happening but accept that he did claim that it would

2 years later, Apple produces an internally-written, incomplete Office suite completely unrelated to StarOffice/OpenOffice

Assumption. As with the time ATi preannounced an Apple product by accident and was dumped for nVidia, Sun screwed up and Apple pulled the whole project in revenge. Pages/Mail/Keynote is the replacement. Numbers is the missing component.

Re:The Numbers Game:

[BWJones]

The thing that many people are really missing out on with Pages is that it really is a DTP program. Adobe and the other programs that perform page layout should have done something like this years ago. Pages is small, compact, pretty speedy and it handles images like no other word processing program I have ever used.

Now if I could just get End Note to work with Pages, I could drop Word entirely.

Re:The Numbers Game:

[Sentry21]

My first impression of Pages came just recently, and I think the best way to sum up my initial reaction to the way it worked was 'Holy crap, it's a Pagemaker clone with attitude!' I used to use Pagemaker back ten to fourteen years ago, and Pages strikes me as startlingly similar to how it worked back then. The placement, flowing of text, text boxes, columns, it's like an easy-to-use Apple-ized DTP rewrite. What a fantastic program.

Haven't used Keynote yet, but I intend to. Looking forward to Numbers. Maybe I'll get lucky and Apple will release a personal accounting package. It'd probably be called 'Accounts' or 'Finances', since 'Money' is already taken.

*hope*

Re:Trademarks Out of Control

[overunderunderdone]

Hello? The company is Apple(TM).

People have been trademarking common words since trademarks were invented. It's nothing new and aside from completely made up words it's hard to avoid.

The more common the word in the industry it's used in the less protection your trademark gives you. A completely made up word (c.f. "Exxon") and you can claim infringement in almost any use by your competitors. "Apple" is just an arbitrary word in the industry it's in so it still gives them pretty good protection. Apple could certainly stop a competitor (but not an orchard) from being named "Apple Systems, Inc." "Numbers" is NOT arbitrary, it's descriptive so Apple would probably have to live with a company in a related field called "NumberSystems Inc." or a product called "Number Cruncher" even if a similar use of a more arbitrary trademark would have been a violation of their trademark.

Re:It's Just In Case

[Spyritus]

Microsoft was caught with QuickTime CODE in Windows Media Player. Microsoft got it when they bought a company Apple was paying to write QuickTime plugins and had given the code to them to help do it. Where Apple got the Code to Microsoft Media player from I have no idea.

Incidentally this infringement lawsuit was the reason QuickTime 2.5 for Mac and Windows was released free.

You'll have to Google real hard for this as all the press-releases on it where removed from Apple's site when the Microsoft's investment where announced, but I assume some courthouse somewhere has documents on it.