Pages in Mirror are Closer than They Appear
People are beginning to post articles explaining exactly what I thought when I initially saw Apple’s Pages:
My take, from the keynote and just a few minutes playing with Pages on the show floor: Apple is lying through their teeth when they call it a word processor. It’s not. It’s a page layout program.
It doesn’t compete with Word. It competes with InDesign.
Okay, not for anyone who’s doing hard-core layout. It’s for those folks who want to do a two or four page newsletter or short brochure. For their school, their holiday family letter, their kid’s sports team, etc. Which is a heck of a lot of projects that aren’t appropriate to try to lay out in Word, but where InDesign is overkill.
It’s entirely about laying out pages, not about editing text. You get some lovely templates with greeked text, and you drag and drop and copy and paste your text and images into the areas.
The rumor mill here says that Apple is more willing to piss off Microsoft than Adobe, so they’re calling it a word processing app instead of an entry-level page layout app. But the latter is what it is, no question. It’s no competition for Word in any way.
Exactly. When my Mom wants to put together a few pages with embedded images, Word is a major pain in the ass. What am I going to do? Tell my Mom to use PageMaker? InDesign?
Pages is InDesign for people who don’t want to have to or don’t need to smoke Adobe’s crack. Adobe may make very useful software, but that says nothing about its actual usability.
I suspect that part of the reason Apple isn’t saying that Pages is page layout software is the pissing off Adobe vs. pissing off Microsoft factor, but I further suspect that the larger reason is that Apple’s target audience doesn’t even know they need to be using page layout software to begin with. Microsoft has most of its customers completely believing that they should do everything in Word. They should add pictures, layout pages, everything. The current Word users don’t even really know when they need to be using something like InDesign, even if they could. This is going to be a very difficult hurdle for Apple’s marketing to overcome: how do you tell users that even though Word could do those things, it’s really a bad idea to even try?
Pages has a rough road ahead largely because of the current consumer mindset, so it makes perfect sense that Apple will try to sell it as a competitor to Word at first. Hopefully people will eventually realize that Word is appropriate for some things, but page layout software like Pages is necessary for other things. Pages could become a really big deal.
I’m excited about this development just for myself. I often to do two or three page layouts that are one-time deals. I know PageMaker quite well, but no longer have a valid license for it. Using Word is such a pain for these things, but I often have to resort to it because it is the only legal software I have. If I get too frustrated with Word, then I’ll use PowerPoint. My only other inexpensive option has seemed to be Microsoft Publisher. Not that great. So, as soon as I get my Mac Mini, I’ll be thrilled to use Pages for these types of layouts. /End Ramble.
Yeah, I didn’t even get into the price factor. I love InDesign and all, but after I’m out of school I no longer have a license for it. I’m not buying InDesign for hundreds of dollars! Pages is fantastically priced. When Keynote alone was $50 I considered it worth it–now for $10 more I’ll get student pricing of Keynote 2 *and* Pages. Crazy.
I think this is becoming Apple’s “thing”. The production of applications that fit in between. Pages isn’t quite Word. It’s not quite InDesign. Pages is just enough more that 99% of folks using it will feel they can do everything they want with it.
This applies to many of Apple’s apps. Garageband does just enough and now just enough more to keep most folks satisfied that they don’t need to make some huge financial leap to the next level. Thig goes for all the iLife apps and the overall Apple philosophy these days it seems. OS X is just enough with just enough more.
*sigh* I want an iPod Shuffle. It’s made for me! I know it is. I only listen to music on random =p
Want to try out Pages too — it’d be so great for my parents coz they have difficulty using Word still^^;;