Redmond's roost: Most Mac owners still buy Office
Apple may be the poster child for showing the industry how to compete effectively with Microsoft, but the company isn't free of Redmond's long arm just yet.
Despite spending years, and millions of dollars in research and development, on its own suite of productivity software, 77 percent of Mac users stick with Microsoft Office, according to a TechFlash report.
I love my Mac, but I couldn't use it without Office. In this, I'm sure I'm not alone, which must give Apple pause whenever it celebrates its rising Mac market share.
Perhaps this is why Apple is releasing a SharePoint-esque knockoff designed around its Pages and Numbers programs, taking Microsoft head-on in document collaboration.
The strategy won't work. Until Apple actually starts winning market share with its iWork suite, it won't matter if the five or six customers who actually use it can collaborate with each other.
No, to end Microsoft's latent stranglehold on its Mac market share, Apple needs to do one of two things vis-a-vis office productivity: go disruptive with a Web-based offering in the manner that Google has, or invest deeply in OpenOffice.org to make it a viable, rock-solid enterprise competitor to Microsoft Office. The first path leads to Mountain View (Google). The second? To Menlo Park (Sun).
Regardless of which path Apple takes, at some point, it must address Microsoft Office. Yes, people could just run Office in a virtual machine or through Boot Camp, but that really only deepens its dependence on Microsoft.
What do you think Apple should do? Or does it matter?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Why don't you?
Why don't you point out that for $499.95 (list price) you get several more pieces in MS Office for Windows than you do for Mac OS X (Access, Contact Management, Accounting, etc.)?
Why don't you point out that while Microsoft is claiming there's an "Apple Tax" for buying Macs (which is debatable depending on the configuration and unit chosen), that there is an undeniable -- and undebatable -- that there is a *Microsoft* Tax for anyone that wants to be cross platform with Office!
Once upon a time Office was virtually identical across Microsoft's OS and Apple's OS. This started to diverge in the 90s. This has continued to diverge since then. The most egregious move recently by Microsoft was the removal of VBA from the Mac OS versions -- even in the small subset of applications that the do include in the suite.
Beat up Microsoft for this. None of it is Apple's fault.
Matt -- I've said it before and I'll keep saying it -- when you write about FOSS related stuff, you generally make sense. When you write about Microsoft, you make no sense. It's clear that you approach any Microsoft topic with one thing in mind -- how it can be brought to its knees. That's the only reason you're so convinced that Apple *must* address MS Office.
Oh please. I am running Vista-64 SP1 Preinstalled, and it works just fine. You have had way too much of Apple's Kool-Aid.
Lucky you. I just find Windows annoying even when it is working "properly" and therefore use a Mac instead. This isn't Kool-Aid but just personal preference. Just learn to accept that not everyone likes Windows and we'll all get on just fine.
Just because you have low standards and don't mind that your PC run slower in Vista doesn't mean everyone else is that way.
One of the most important things in the world of work is the accessibility of your work, that anyone can open and edit your work. Right now, thanks to the hidden nature of MS formats, that means if 90%+ of people use MS you send them files for MS. I don't give a monkeys if iWork gives me some kind of euphoric high when I use it, if I can't work 100% with any MS Office files it's useless to me and most other people for anything but personal projects.
That being said I agree with the posts above, Apple does not need to compete with office or drive it off the Mac. Apple has always been very conservative about entering a market, unlike MS who feels like they must dominate any market that uses software in any way. iWork is a great alternative to MSOffice for many users. Apple will continue to carefully pick their battles.
If Apple really wanted to drive up iWorks market share I could see them releasing it for windows the same way they did for iTunes and then Safari. Apple hasn't been able to write great software for windows though. Google Chrome has turned out to be what Safari for windows should have been. If Apple was going to push OpenOffice.org it would have done so instead of releasing iWork in the first place.
If iWorks will read and write .doc and .xls files. I'll happily dump Office.
iWork is OK but frustrating at times.
Be polite, be calm, and be respectful. You'll go much farther.
In my opinion, Apple has the upper arm with Keynote (over Powerpoint) but only time will tell w/ Pages. I happen to really like Pages but I am going to sit this one (iWork '09) out and wait for the next version to be released. While Apple does not offer upgrade pricing for iWork (not that I'm complaining), neither does Microsoft; iWork also costs a lot less than Office sans Student/Teacher Ed.
I was pretty excited about Numbers--it is a great Excel-like application, but it's not Excel....more like a watered-down, easier to use version. I've yet to see anything that it can do (or do better) than Excel, so it also has some maturing to do.
For anyone that has used Office, they know it's a more nuts-and-bolts type of application. For anyone that has used iWork (from '05 to present), they know that has a few more versions to go through before it can be considered a true Office competitor. The hardest part? Convincing businesses that iWork is a viable alternative...
My suggestion is that Apple should provide upgrade pricing for iWork (which MS doesn't do for Mac versions) so there is a cost incentive to switch, and possibly upgrade. My second suggestion is to make it more ubiquitous--give it away for free to non-profits, governments, etc. Sales alone are not going to de-throne Word/Excel/Powerpoint--you have to drive it to their front door. My third suggestion is to make iWork for Windows--the best way to compete is to keep the consumer happy, and out of the crossfire. I use Macs and PCs, but if iWork were available for both Windows and Mac (as AppleWorks once was), you'd see adoption go up. As long as it is a Mac-only application, it will only stay on the Mac; Office is both a Windows and Mac application, so you can do the math.
Read the classic essay, "I, Pencil" here:
http://www.fee.org/pdf/books/I,%20Pencil%202006.pdf
Office sucks. It is bloated, expensive and is chock full of security issues.
For home use, people buy office student edition, which is cheap enough, because they think they need it. After a while, some learn they don't.
But as for the logic of people's actions and knowing anything about what they need? One of the top Mac downloads is still Windows Media Player 9. Sure, it's no longer supported, sure it really doesn't work for a lot of new things, sure even MS tells people to download Flip4Mac instead along with Silverlight for web based MS stuff, but that doesn't stop people from believing they must download WMP, searching for it, and downloading it anyway.
People are sheep. MS counts on that? ;)
Second, what makes you believe that Microsoft would shoot itself in the foot by discontinuing Office for Mac? For one thing, they make a pile of money selling Office licenses to Mac users, and that only goes up as Mac ownership goes up. Second, any move to discontinue Office for Mac in the face of profitability would be immediately seen for what it is and would raise the antitrust boogeyman once again, something Redmond would probably like to avoid.
I would like to add that I think apple is spot on with the pricing of iWork where Microsoft was smoking something much stronger than tobacco when they came up with the pricing for Office. I love how people try to say that Apple computers are overpriced... when you add in all the functionality that you get with a mac the mac is much cheaper than a windows PC.
If you are co-authoring something then there is an obvious requirement for the same toolset, and it should be identical. As much as I would like to "stick it" to Redmond, my experience has been that using OpenOffice to work on a text document created with Word is unreliable. Lots issues with broken or changed formatting unless you are dealing with the simplest of text documents.
As for the other tools in the MS suite (like mail, contacts, web publishing), I personally can't stand them and I suspect that many others would find alternative applications more attractive as well.
MS makes good money off of its macintosh application division.
...On the other hand, Apple's "Numbers" is extremely slow opening Excel files and loses a lot of formatting. I don't consider Apple's iWork apps to be at all compatible with MS Office files. The other downside to iWork apps is that they are *only* usable on Macs; I have to also use Windows and Unix systems and want (should) be able to run the same applications on all of them -- OpenOffice provides that, in spades.
So it seems that it should be nearly a slam-dunk for Apple to adopt OpenOffice. Macs have enjoyed renewed success (market share) based a lot on greater interoperability with Windows. E.g. using Intel processors, I can now buy a Mac without "separation anxiety" from Windows -- I can now buy a Mac and still run Windows applications on it directly for a while while I "wean myself" from those applications, using CrossOver and/or a VM product (VirtualBox, VMware, or Parallels). So greater compatibility of Apple productivity software (spreadsheet, word processor, presentation, etc) with MS Office files would only serve to lower the Windows-to-MacOS migration barrier even further.
(don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that Apple lower its applications to the crude level of MS Office apps, esp Word <shudder>, but Apple would benefit greatly from being able to read/write MS Office files)
OpenOffice looks like a *much* better option than Google-style online applications and I would certainly encourage Apple to invest in it!
Matt for what do you use Office
Sorry, I am not willing to waste my time or try to convince others to waste theirs whenever I need to send or share a document. That is the same reason why I still own and run WordPerfect (on a Parallels VM in my Mac), as some courts still use it.
Other than compatibility, I actually like MS Office. I have an Exchange server for my calendar and email and love the ability to maintain identical email and calendar across machines and across platforms. Even if I didn't use PCs on occasion (I game), and didn't need to share documents, I would still buy Office for Mac because after over 20 years of using it, it is familiar, natural and just plain efficient for me to do so.
- by dannyo152 January 7, 2009 10:33 AM PST
- I think it's probably a good thing that Microsoft has two viable products that Mac owner may consider (Office and Windows) and do purchase. The margins for those products must be outstanding. I don't know if iWork is profitable for Apple. Previous versions were not business ready. There is the file format issue which requires the presence of mind to save as before distributing. One wonders why Project/Plan/Access are also not ported by Microsoft. I think they would rapidly ascend to the top of Mac software market share and bring Microsoft profits.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (59 Comments)As to Apple, their software business begins when someone buys a Mac. Advertising which mentions Vista and XP is there because the operating system is the key differentiator for the system. I take late 90s Jobs at face value when he explained that he had to change the attitude of those in the company who thought "Apple loses when Microsoft wins." Put all that together and I think there is a competitive spirit at the two companies, but it isn't as cutthroat as the tech blogs suggest, especially as Mac vs. Windows items draw the page hits. Office on a Mac == profit/profit.