Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri Jul 28, 2006 9:30 am Post subject:
Personally, I don't think it'll have much of an impact at all. After using Keynote and playing with one of the free trials of Pages, I really expect that any charting or spreadsheet application will really have a nice UI rethink adn be really focused on nice small-business and home user tasks (think sports league rankings, basic business charts) and easily creating nice whizbang eye-popping graphics for presentations and newsletters.
The most likely impact that it will have is that people get excited about iWork and don't adopt either Neo or MS Office. Hopefully that'll continue to convince Apple to keep developing iWork and investing in trying to think of better ways to redesign the whole way we have to use office suites
Apple is not planning on positioning Charts as a competitor to Microsoft's Excel, but rather as a more consumer-friendly spreadsheet application that can handle the needs of home users and small businesses but not pretend to execute any of the more advanced functions of Excel.
Anyone using NeoOffice because they need a little spreadsheet now and then will have an alternative from the mothership. Anyone who needs more advanced features still has the same set of alternatives: Microsoft, X11, or us.
I don't see it making that much of a difference, really. Except as another proprietary format we won't be able to open :/
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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