January 11, 2005 12:45 PM PST
iWork productivity software targets Microsoft's Office
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Apple chief Steve Jobs announced iWork '05 on Tuesday at the Macworld trade show. The $79 package includes Pages, a new word processing program developed by Apple, and an updated version of Keynote, a slideshow application Apple introduced two years ago. The company also introduced the $499 Mac Mini, new flash-memory-based iPods and other releases.
The software will be available in the United States on Jan. 22 and worldwide Jan. 29.
The Mac maker's current AppleWorks productivity package has achieved only modest market share, mostly in educational settings, and the company's FileMaker database software has never posed a significant threat to Microsoft's similar Access.
However, Jobs said one of the major advantages of iWork will be its integration with the Mac OS X operating system. "iWork is a product we've created from the ground up to take advantage of OS X," he said during his speech.
Pages and Keynote 2 will also be integrated with Apple's updated version of iLife, iLife '05, which includes new versions of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand and the latest version of iTunes.
Pages allows consumers to create letters, newsletters, reports, brochures and resumes while also making it easy to drag and drop photos from iPhoto into documents.
Photos will also be easily inserted into Keynote 2 using iLife as will movies and music.
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Electronics & Computers Deals here!
1. Steve and Bill have an agreement in place - remember - and Steve, while quite a maniac, would not thwart that venture. (Remember that is a compliment)
2. Steve sells more Powerbooks with the Microsoft Office promise of interoperability with the rest of the world as far as the Office goers are concerned. Honestly, I may not have bought a powerbook if Microsoft office was not available - my colleagues would have made my life so miserable to bear. I am not sure he would like to kill this goose that lays some sort of useful eggs at least, golden or otherwise.
3. To ward off flames, My suspicion as to why Steve had developed Safari while Microsoft made available its IE on the Macs, could be a mutual ploy ! Microsoft is facing a lot of heat from various directions on its IE. This may be a welcome respite for Bill which may be again under the umbra of the erstwhile agreement ! just a suspicion.
4. As an offbeat thought, consider why Apple brought out the Mac mini ? In all this hullaballoo, the middle market user has largely been forgotten. Bill in his wisdom has somehow brought the PC to the masses, but has forgotten about the fact that, now that everyone has a pc, they would all expect a general standard of outgoing communications and hence would need a proper word processor or spreadsheet. Steve, being a crafty maniac, has seen this burgeoning market, albeit a bit late, and would like to cash in on it while the going is good ! So in my opinion, he is addressing this market with a nice robust stable box with a good plethora of software (ilife, iwork etc.)
While the Mac mini does look stunning, I would definitely not condone the "Bring your own keyboard" stupidity. Of course I would not want to plug in any stupid keyboard - I would like an apple keyboard. Moreover, those who would like to switch, would love to have the applesque keyboard than to have a Micro2000 keyboard or some such local store nonsense. Now, would I see the local store stirring up some make-do applesque keyboard - I am not interested. My strong opinion is the $499 great hoohaa should have included the keyboard and a mouse that would have been worthy of the applesphere.
Mac Workplace for the enterprise that unifies and integrates the following:
Calendar, Mail, Pages, Tables, AddressBook, Keynote
Mac Homefront(iWork) for the home:
iCal(stripped down Calendar), iDoc (Stripped down pages or pages as it is today), iMail (for lack of something better, thunderbird), iXY (spreadsheet), iWho(addressbook)
I love keynote and simply dying to get my copy of keynote 2 ! (Sorry, the weakness must be accepted).