Corel bills its WordPerfect Office software as ‘the world’s leading alternative to Microsoft Office’. But when it comes to US retail sales, Corel lost the no. 2 spot in 2005 to a somewhat unlikely competitor: Apple Computer’s iWork. According to market researcher NPD, Apple grabbed a 2.7 percent unit share, while Corel had a 1.6 percent share. Microsoft maintained its dominance with nearly 95 percent of unit sales.
It would be interesting to see how iWork would fair if ported to win32. I wonder how big of a hit MSOffice would take in its own arena.
…not that Apple would ever port the signature apps that add such unique value to the Mac platform. But, then again, people also swore they’d never go Intel.
EDIT: Of course, they’d also need to build a spreadsheet app before they can seriously go head-to-head.
Edited 2006-01-24 14:59
…and a database app (access), and an XML form tool (infopath), and a full tablet notes app (OneNote), and a diagramming app (visio)
You can bring together all of these with various Mac apps, but MS Office is much more vast and powerful (but not simpler) than Apple’s suite.
iWork isn’t really aimed at being a business suite either, so the competition is in a different market. Corel is right up against Microsoft. Apple are with home users who want a cheap, simple to use solution without the complexity of office; the competition in the home market is not even half as strong.
That either says something really bad about Corel or really good about Apple considering the small user-base that iWork can be marketed to compared to the large user base that Corel can market WP Office to.
I think Corel is being stupid, it’s obvious that it’s being backed into a corner by ms office from the windows side, iwork from the mac side, and openoffice from the open-source side, and instead of for example doing the #1 commercial office suite for linux, with opendoc, which could land them lots of clients that want to migrate to linux, but think openoffice is not ready, they continue to stuck their fingers in their ears and say “We’re #2, we’re #2 I’M NOT HEARING YOU”.
I’m really puzzled by their strategy. It’s as if they’re afraid of offending MS and lose that miniscule 1.7% of the market. And by the way, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” could make sense, but when your kingdom is a tiny grain of dust … well, that’s just pathetic.
rehdon
I think they should switch to OpenDoc AND go for all three major operating systems. Right now over 97% of people using office suites aren’t compatible with the WP Office formats, so switching could only bring those numbers up. Supporting multiple platforms also means that from a commercial perspective it will be attractive, when a company can have Windows Mac and Linux based systems all running the same office suite so users can use it on either one without even having to know they’re on a different OS. As I recall WP Office had a bigger user base back when they had a Windows and Linux version.
I can’t remember how long ago it was now, but Corel mentioned interest in bringing back their Linux version of WP Office. Since then though there’s been nothing from them and I think it’s been well over a year.
It is true of a lot of second best (and still pretty good) products on the windows platform that could pretty easily capture market share on Mac &Linux and achieve dominance, whilst helping to create a nice migration wave they could ride for a few years….
I haven’t really worked with iWork, nor have I seen it or heard of it before. But I think it’s surprising how the wordprocessing markets get recognized.
Divide users into heavy users and light users. Where Heavy users probably are circling around MSO and Corel, I’d guess Light users are competing with OOo/Staroffice VS, Ms Work and stuff like iWork. There’s a whole bunch in this segment few are aware of, like 602 softwares solution, Abiword etc…
So it really only get’s exciting to talk about it when dividing reality.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a Mac user (home machine) but I do not think that these two products are comparable.
iWork has:
Pages – a page layout program (you could call it a word processor)
Keynote – a presentation tool
Office (for Windows) has:
Word (word processing)
Excel (spreadsheet)
Access (database)
Outlook (email program and collaboration tool)
Powerpoint (presentation tool)
Apple, at the very least, is missing a good spreadsheet (numbers has failed to materialize). Also Apple is missing a bundled database app (I know filemaker exists, but it is extra money, and not directly from apple even though they are a subsidiary).
Finally, looking at email apps, Apple does have “mail” but mail lacks the collaboration and project management functions that outloook/entourage have.
I think that iWork, as an office “suite” is at a disadvantage and thus should not be called an “office suite” and a competitor to MS Office because you are comparing apples to oranges.
just my 2 cents
You are right about comparing Apples with Oranges, however, if one were to look at the market purely from a end user stand point, as an ‘office suite’ for the small business and family, iWork seems to stand out as a good competitor, purely because it isn’t overly complex, its relatively cheap,
For most people, even the office is seen as an over kill – something that one would purchase if one really required, but as an office replacement, it would require major reworking, which unfortunately would end up killing off the simplicity which made it popular in the first place.
Personally I think Thinkfree Office (http://www.thinkfree.com/) is a better bet for Apple users, as it has Word, Spreadsheet and Presentations, with pretty darn good Office compatibility, and for $20 less than iWork (it costs $50). For a little extra you can get the iPod edition that lets you use your iPod to store and present your presentations.
It’s a Java app, but it runs beautifully, and its Settings utility allows users to turn on font anti-aliasing within the application (this is needed on Windows, not sure about Mac).
The problem with Pages is that it has a very awkward UI: defining your own styles in particular is a bit weird, I much prefer the dialog in the latest versions of Office.
***Most*** users that I support at work (Windows users) don’t use spreadsheets, or presentation programs. These people make up only about 5% of staff. E-mail comes with every computer. All they use is Word and Access and they don’t use most of the capabilities of either and could get buy with something will only about 5% of the features.
What most of them really want is a wordprocessing/layout program that is very easy to use. Pages would be more than enough for 99% of people I support. Note that we support about 10,000 desktop computers.
Not to nitpick on your anecdotal data. But I hope Apple does not think like you do and not make a spreadsheet. Most people around me (the me-centric world view) use Excel pretty intensively and Powerpoint moderately. A note on the side, you say “***most*** users don’t use…” then say that…”These people make up only about 5%…”…then “All they use Word and Access…” therefore “Pages (a word processing software) will work for 99% of people”…The numbers are definitely creatively used…Obviously did not use Excel. Of course, this could mean many things. e.g. you support 5% of the staff only and they use some form of database management that is inbuilt (maybe hidden) in Pages). Interesting… 🙂
Wow! We use spreadsheets for tracking just about everything at work! Without Excel our operation would come to a standstill…
Spreadsheets are used for editing and manipulating customer data, managing our deployment process, tracking projects, etc. It’s a great, generic tool. I am also guessing that the finance dept. uses it… I am just talking about the IT group…
I _used_ to love WordPerfect. For every good thing Corel has done with WordPerfect they have screwed up 10 things.
The only thing good about Word is that it is so messed up that I make a pretty good living supporting it. For instance, I recently had a user where they bolded and underlined some text. When they clicked on save the bold and underline disappeared. What the ****? I had to have her delete that whole paragraph and recreated it and then it was fine. In WordPerfect you can at least “reveal codes” and find the offending formatting problem and fix it.
I favour OOo. On OS X OOo – or better NeoOfficeJ – is not that popular, but IMO still better than pages.
OOo is free and en par with MS Office. Some things are better in OOo, some are better in MSO. But biggest plus of OOo is, it is free.
Agreed: NeoOfficeJ is a great alternative. But does anyone know the status of the port from OOo2?
Pages works well, I use it to read our MS Word docs and I also develop my own docs using it and save it in a Word format. It is a little sparse on features, but does what it is supposed to do.
see
http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/features/tables.html
maybe thinking in terms of spreadsheet database word-processor is more tradition then necessity. Maybe Pages will break with that traditions
These are not equivalent to a spreadsheet. MS Word also has these since god knows when. So at best you could say Pages is catching up, NOT “breaking traditions”. They do not supplant Excel unless your spreadsheet requirements are rather rudimentary. This is like saying Pivot tables in Excel replace Access.
You are right of course. I just did not know what you can do with word. On the other hand I think that pages with its gui with inspectors is more inspired by object orientation and is a bit different than the gui of word os open office or abi or ….. I can be wrong again not knowing word or pages that well.” This is like saying Pivot tables in Excel replace Access.”
sometimes they do ;-).
Edited 2006-01-24 21:30
You are right of course. I just did not know what you can do with word. On the other hand I think that pages with its gui with inspectors is more inspired by object orientation and is a bit different than the gui of word os open office or abi or ….. I can be wrong again not knowing word or pages that well.
I have a feeling that Apple approached Pages from the end users stand point – and lets be honest here, most people use their word processor as more of a glorified desktop publisher than strictly as a wordprocessor – so for some, the lay out of Pages is probably very logical, whilst for others, those of the puritan word processing stance will see this as something rather strange and troubling.
For me, I’ve dumped Office – I only used it because it was a damn site better than Apple works in respects to how things are done, but now, considering that the most I use out of a office suite is the word processor, and with university, a little presentation, the rest is really a waste of hard disk space for me – and as for Mail, its good enough for me, it does the job, its simple and reliable.
AppleWorks, $79 for spreadsheet, drawing, painting, database, presentation and word processing.
It reads and writes MS Word and Excel files.
Sure Apple is trying to weed us off of it, but it’s a tough sell.
Apple could make a Office killer in a heartbeat that would take substancial market share in a few short years.
But Apple is playing nice to MS for now, even selling OfficeMac heavily.
But the thunder is building.
iWork is still a baby but growing, it may lack some features (havent tried ’06 yet) but it is otherwise much simpler and fun to use than MS Office which is incredibly boring.
Pages 2 can now make spreadsheets.
Keynote rules for sure.
As far as Mail is concerned, it works fine with the College Exchange server and I now use it instead of Entourage for being a smarter app. Plus LDAP actually works perfectly straight from the To: field to instantly find any contact, whereas Entourage only gives an error message.
I payed for iWork the night before an important essay when I was fed up with Word and haven’t looked back since. It was amazing how simple it was to produce a highly polished well formatted paper, which Word would have made it a pain to produce.
Plus MS Office apps are the slowest to load and commonest to crash and always look and feel bloated.
etc, etc, etc nuff said
Nice to see that the talented Bruce (Hammond), Scott (Lindsey) and the other quality engineers from Gobe (Productive fame, and previously Claris Works) are still enriching humanity with their skills in designing easy to use Office like applications.
Way to go.
I have both iWork 05 and iWork 06 installed on my PowerBook, along with MS Office 2004. Therefore, I am free to use either iWork or MS Office and so use whichever applications work best for me.
So far, I have found Pages to be *much* more stable, reliable and predictable than Word. In other words, I can apply formatting, position objects and flow text in complex ways around objects with confidence in Pages. In Word, I just don’t have that same positive experience as Word too often does bizarre things to my documents. In Pages, everything seems to just work, and to work in the way that I expect it to work.
I too was hopeful that Apple would release a spreadsheet application to complement Pages, and was disappointed when they didn’t. However, Apple did add some nice spreadsheet-lite functionality directly into Pages. For a large percentage of documents, the spreadsheet-lite functionality will probably be adequate. Moreover, I’ve found that I prefer the iWork model of having spreadsheet functionality within Pages over the MS model of having two separate (Word and Excel) applications. In other words, now that I’ve used Pages 06’s spreadsheet functionality, I hope that Apple doesn’t factor that functionality out into a separate application in a future release. I’d prefer instead that Apple just adds more spreadsheet functionality to Pages.
I haven’t used Keynote very much yet, and so don’t have too much to say about it other than I do like Keynote’s ability to export to lots of formats.
Office software a bought in bulk by corporations. As Corel points out, that were they make the huge majority of their sales, with OEM bundling.
These stats only look at the retail market, where Apple is likely to get a stronger showing, since the Mac is mostly a consumer and small business product.