The new Pages isn't junk if you want to have the same stuff on your computer and on your tablet, and you don't care about semi-professional layout. I think what has gone wrong is that Pages '09 offered something unique: it is the only easy-to-use and affordable substitute for the likes of InDesign and Quark Express, on any platform. A certain community seems to have grown up using Pages in that role, and I think Apple have either not paid attention to that or they just don't find it important. Maybe they just decided that you can't develop Pages '09 any further without inevitably slipping into the kind of feature bloat and inconsistency that makes Word the **** that it is.
Maybe someone else will create an Apple App that works as a kind of Pages Pro or InDesign Lite. There are a couple of possible candidates in the App store (Swift Publisher, iStudio) but the reviews haven't persuaded me to try them yet.
Whatever. The problem isn't so much that they have made a defeatured piece of software but that they have announced it as an update of Pages. It just isn't a continuation of Pages; it's a different program for different purposes. It would be an RTF word processor, if only it could save RTFs! If they had just given it a different name and not made it kidnap files which are full of stuff that it can't handle, it would have been fine.
I should just go back to my usual policy of being a late adopter or abstainer and only pick up things that I know I want for some reason.
And in the bigger picture: focusing only on the customers who are avidly buying products in the short term is not special to Apple; it's the way business works at this juncture in history. The customer who only buys something occasionally, but prefers to stay true to a supplier for decades, is seriously out of fashon. Unfortunately, the world may have to go through a real depression (not the mild premonition of one we had in 2008) before we all get back to sober and human business values.
