iWork in second place
According to a survey, Apple’s iWork is second place after Microsoft Office in market share. This does not mean that iWork is going to dominate over Microsoft Office. Microsoft has a strong lead, but in one year iWork has taken an impressive percentage of users. The latest numbers are
- Microsoft Office: 95%
- Apple iWork: 2.7%
- Corel WordPerfect: 1.6%
NPD analyst Chris Swenson stated: Apple’s share is particularly impressive considering that iWork runs only on Macs, which account for a small fraction of computers.
Mac users may not be in high numbers, but the iPod has introduced many people to Mac and the user base is increasing.
iWork was introduced January 2005 and includes presentation software (Keynote) and word processing software (Pages). While this is not a full office suite, the numbers are impressive. For instance, it is reported that on the Mac platform iWork accounted for about 17.4% while Microsoft Office got about 82%.
A few things may contribute to this increase in market share. One is the fact that a trial version of iWork is bundled with Mac OS X may help in the figures as users may buy once the 30-day period runs out.
If you do not use the full potential of Microsoft Office, there are many free alternatives available. OpenOffice is the most widely known alternative. It is a full-featured office suite which is compatible with Microsoft Office.
For my office suite I use NeoOffice, also an open-source project, which makes OpenOffice run natively on Mac OS X. What does this mean? In short, this means that NeoOffice has access to Mac OS fonts and other features. OpenOffice does not have this access as it runs as a UNIX program in Mac OS. If any of this is confusing to you then do not worry about this techie stuff that I speak of.
Because I have no desire to spend large amounts of money on Microsoft Office, I find that NeoOffice works well for me and I can save file in the Microsoft format if I choose.
No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize:
The Restart of My Blog.
