Earl Moore writes that the Appleworks suite has reached 'End of Life' status, and it got me to thinking. I've never owned or used a Mac or Appleworks. I wonder if it's anything like Microsoft's eternally retarded and resoundingly ignored MS-Works application suite.
MS-Works had most if not all of the functionality that I needed in an office suite, but I always found it to be significantly incompatible with their proper 'MS-Office' suite. Now, I'm talking about when it came with my Win95 equipped system back in the day. I have neither heard nor seen mention of it to this day - although it seems via Wikipedia that it's alive and still breathing at version 9.0.
I never used it simply because I always wanted the 'pro' apps and not the crippled ones. And if you were working in MS-Office at work, then you wanted full and unmistakable compatibility at home. I always wondered who actually used it.
Mind you, I've always been against feature bloat, and everyone knows that 95% of people use 10% of the features in Word and Excel. I'm sure MS-Works would have been perfectly satisfactory for my use. I always scratched my head at why they didn't just make proper 'lite' versions of Word and Excel. I'm sure they would have sold many copies at $39.99 a pop. Instead, people pirated the entire Office Suite.
The Mac world is largely alien to me. Did (and do) Mac users actually use the Appleworks suite? Or did they flock to high-priced 'pro-level' apps instead?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
Hi Richard:
I've never used AppleWorks. I think it's similar to MS-Works in it's feature set but with a little more compatibility. It did include a spreadsheet so not until iWork 08 included the new "Numbers" spreadsheet and could it replace AppleWorks.
I would guess MS and others don't produce proper "Lite" versions they feel it would steal market share from their extremely expensive and feature burdened mainline products.
Why sell them a hammer when you can sell them a "Nail Driving Machine."
It's called focusing on the bottom line instead of the customers needs.... ;-)
Post a Comment