I'll reference my ZDNet buddy Dan Farber and say that it's not a zero-sum game. There are dual-use scenarions, switcher scenarios, and "I'll stick with what I've got" scenarios. Let me give you a perfect example:
I have a license for Microsoft Office:Mac 2004. It's installed on my wife's iMac. She's generally used it primarily to read Office docs sent to her by people she does business with (a bunch of artists BTW, not classic business users). Lately, she's been inundated with .docx files as a number of her friends and colleagues have taken the Office 2007 plunge and don't understand that Mac users have been unable to open these files (unless they know about and are willing to run a beta converter utility).
Yesterday she received one of these files. I told her to drag it onto Pages in the Dock on her Mac. It opened and she looked at me and asked, "why do I need the Microsoft stuff on my machine?"
I told her she didn't. The iWork '08 apps will open Word, PowerPoint and Excel files just fine - including Office 2007 formats - and the minor formatting issues she's likely to encounter don't prevent her from reading and responding.
Me? I'm an entirely different case. I need Track Changes and other more advanced capabilities in Office so I'm running both on my MacBook. But for my own authoring, I'm really enjoying the new version of Pages (I hated the last one) and Numbers is a much more useful tool for me than Excel as I tend to build a lot of list and report sheets which is where this new app really shines. I'm not a spreadsheet monster - don;t use macros or even Pivot Tables. And I switched to Keynote because it does everything I need in a presentation program and has always done a good enough job converting .ppt file when I need to rework an existing presentation in that format. It's a classic YMMV scenario.
So I think there are some (like me) who can build a case for using both and others (like my wife) for whom iWork '08 is all that's needed.
Discussion on:
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