For the benefit of everyone else, as robogobo tried to slide past the question in the unlinked other thread, here is my response to him:
Apple does pay attention to this forum. when it speaks up, loud and clear with one voice.
The almost unprecedented post of the future updates with some sort of a time line points to that.
Also the sudden presence of Apple support staff here (the Black Bars) seems to be someone's idea of damage control. Unfortunately they seem to be reading from some knowledgebase articles and haven't much of a clue.
However it would be true that normally they don't, because they aren't interested for exactly the same reason as is evident in robogobo's response to what does he value user's work.
robogobo wrote:
I have no idea how to assess this. Is it an autobiography or garage sale stickers? What a ridiculous question.
To robogobo and Apple, yes it is a ridiculous question. For both of them it is not their work.
In the case of Apple it is not their work and not on software they use themselves.
That is the heart of the problem and why the users here feel so intensely about this issue.
It is their work, it is valuable whether it is a "garage sale sticker", an "autobiography" or more likely all their business's billings, or 4 years of an academic's work, their thesis, their technical journals, their publications, a travel guide, advertising, entire family history, journal, pitch for that great idea, legal submissions, or any of a million reasons people put their work to paper or screen.
Pages 5 along with Keynote and Numbers are now worthless by Apple's own word. No charge, free, here have one. But we all here paid for them for a reason and more than the paltry few dollars in the App Store. Apple did a magnificent job on selling the applications to us, as an alternative to Ms Office, telling us how much we could achieve using them. And Apple for once was right, we discovered just how brilliant those applications were, turning them to ideas Apple never thought of because although they weren't perfect they could do things that no other application could.
Then having fully committed ourselves to the iWork apps as a medium, all our work locked into their format, Apple announced the long awaited "upgrade" the one that would fix the remaining issues with the software.
The reality was an almost totally new file format, that so poorly translates the old files it actually screws them up and a decimation of the features, rendering the software now largely pointless and a hazard to your business.
As Apple hadn't announced any of this it took some detective work to unmask the real story in this forum. When the apparent depth of the bait and switch dawned on the users of course the reaction was predictable.
I think Apple was genuinely caught by surprise as it doesn't seem to value the software itself (hasn't touched it in years, nor uses it in its offices) and honestly doesn't give a thought for its users or their work.
Apple's self obsession is what makes it so hard to get its attention and get it do what it just never ever does, which is think about its users except as some abstract species, supposedly benefiting from Apples largess and dutifully worshiping at the designated Apple temples where they can make the usual offerings.
Apple likes to talk about its users, and how important they are, but the truth is they design for themselves. The problem here is how can they design the iWork and iLife suites for themselves when they don't actually use them. They are a remote, enormously overpaid, isolated elite sitting in an ivory tower just turning their attention to the free toy in the bottom of the cereal box. something they had largely ignored for years.
Given what they did to it, I hate to say this, I wish they had continued to ignore it.
Peter
