http://news.com.com/Apples+iWork+emerges+as+rival+to+Microsoft+Office/2100-1012_3-6030011.html

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Pages, IMO, is close to FrameMaker in conception and ever since Adobe dropped the ball on a native OS X FrameMaker port I’ve been using Pages for everything, big and small. It works if you make the minimal investment to learn it well and construct your own templates.

iWork is dirt cheap compared to Office. This alone makes the suite compelling. The bottom line is that Pages has replaced Word in the things I do and it has worked out exceptionally well.

While there are problems (most of them are newbie issues) the simple fact is that Pages can compete with Word and if you don’t think so, either you’re using a lot of Office integration (I do not) or you don’t understand things. So take a step back and learn it.

Keynote — so much better than PP, and we can do really polished work that looks clean and feels tight.
NeoOffice — daily use for text and spreadsheets we can share w/ clients & contractors. A bit clunky, and not pretty for graphs.
MS Office — last resort, but still stuck with Excel for complex modeling because our monte-carlo tools only run there. Excel graphs are also prettier.
Pages — anything on letterhead goes out pages -> PDF. The para numbering doesn’t get screwed up, and images behave properly.

Many of the “needed” feastures above are needed before Pages will replace NeoOffice. Pages is a bit slower (!), doesn’t allow us to create complex templates, and is generally bizarre about some things. Plus side is that paragraph formats and rules can be enforced, and since Adobe (may they rot in hell) dropped Framemaker we’ve been bereft.

although this is a long shot, if apple integrated this software into leopard, it would truly provide an all-inclusive out-of-the-box feeling!!! You wouldn’t really need anything!!!

Media apps like iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie were of course utterly brilliant because they got right in front of a massive wave of consumer interest in rich media.

Internet apps like iWeb attempt to get in on the ground floor of the “next Office” — Internet content creation and publishing. (Unfortunately for Apple, Web apps will almost certainly dominate this space and Google is way out front with Blogger and Google Docs+Spreadsheets.)

But a document-oriented app? To control how things look when printed out on paper? How old school is that? Plus they just antagonize MSFT for no particular reason.

Unless they know something about the future of Office for Mac the rest of us do not.

Some say Apple needs to come out with a spreadsheet app to compete with Microsoft Excel and Corel’s WordPerfect Office Quattro Pro. I disagree. Spreadsheets are too tied to certain data structures and functions. What Apple should do is come out with a database app, like a FileMaker Lite. Apple could call this new app Data, or DB. This database app could still serve as a number-cruncher for spreadsheet users, but also work well with mailing lists and other data structures. Then iWork would be more complete. If iWork had a “Data” app that could also work well with Apple’s Address Book technology and its iCal and Mail.app, (or perhaps acts as the next step up from them, much as Aperture is professional software versus the consumer-oriented iPhoto) then you’re getting somewhere!

BTW: If you want to see how cool the spread sheet program will be, just add some formulas to a table in pages to see how nice the UI of a spread sheet can be. iWork will have it’s day, just like iPhoto now does (do you remember how many people trashed iPhoto 1.0?).

Pages is another story. Its problem, IMO, is that it is a taint–taint a word processor and taint a DTP application. That is, it’s more powerful than just a word processor but nowhere near as powerful as XPress or In Design.

So people use Word. The thing is, Word has far more stuff than Pages, but the fact is, most people don’t use all that flab. They use it like a word processor. Professionals don’t use it for DTP, amateurs (and cheap businesses pawning it off on secretaries), however, do. So the high-end DTP apps have their place, and the word processors have their place. Where does pages fit in?

So I agree that Keynote is the star and Pages doesn’t have a market.

Pages is slow. Pages is beautiful, however, and I cannot make myself use anything else now that I have seen its output, unless I really require features Pages lacks. There are some specialty features for legal writing that nobody’s gotten right since WordPerfect, but WordPerfect doesn’t ship for Macs (nor does IBM’s Lotus SmartSuite). However, for ordinary letters, pamphlets, and so on, the appearance of Pages places it at the top of my list. The problem is that someone seriously needs to do some performance profiling on the app and fix its glacial speed. The app is not snappy to begin with, and after being in use for a while becomes unusably slow even on a late-generation G5 iMac 20″. This is most pronounced on long docs, even without lots of images. Fifty pages? Ugh.

If Apple offered a spreadsheet, and enabled integration of between it and iPhoto, iMovie, the spreadsheet, Keynote, and Pages, one would have a very attractive environment for creating written and live presentations, and keeping both live and written versions synchronized.

I see iWork as a work in progress, though the price of this work in progress is admittedly galling. If I’m going to beta test a product, I want a price break. However, the products look so good, it’s hard to complain at the results.

I suspect Apple’s avoidance of the enterprise market may be impacted by fear that moving before it is really ready to pose a threat, that is, before it’s really ready for the all-fronts attack, will result in nasty consequences that will harm short-term marketing. Apple’s incompetence at Enterprise can’t be an accident, it has to be a deliberate decision that Apple is not yet ready to approach the market. The question is whether Apple will ever decide that there is a good time, or whether Apple really just does not want to succeed in that market.