As Apple introduced its own productivity software on Tuesday, Microsoft reiterated its commitment to the Mac market and said sales of its Mac Office package are growing.
Microsoft said it sold more copies of Office 2004 for the Mac in the first three months after its release than the company sold in the first six months of the prior version.
The news comes as Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced iWork, a package combining an updated version of Apple's Keynote presentation software, along with Pages, a new word processing program.
"We have no plans to stop developing Office for Mac," Scott Erickson, group product manager for Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, said in an interview ahead of the iWork introduction.
He said development of the next version of Office for the Mac is well under way and that Microsoft is on track with its schedule, which calls for a new version every 18 to 24 months. Office 2004 debuted in April of last year.
In addition, Microsoft said it is readying a new version of MSN Messenger for the Mac. Set to debut in the second half of this year, MSN Messenger five will be able to connect to corporate servers running Live Communications Server, and users will be able to log in to both corporate and personal messaging accounts.
Microsoft also said it will offer some free enhancements to Office in the second half of this year, with many of the changes aimed at making Office 2004 more compatible with Exchange servers and with Outlook.
"In the six months since we launched Office 2004, our customers told us they needed deeper Exchange support," Roz Ho, Macintosh Business Unit general manager, said in a statement. "We heard them, and it's coming."
In particular, the Entourage email program can now import personal storage files from Outlook via a downloadable software add-on, and in the second half of the year it will also be able to better connect to global address books from an Exchange server and help users better manage maxed-out Exchange email accounts.
Microsoft said it is working with Apple to make sure Office 2004 is ready for Tiger, in particular that the built-in Spotlight search tool will be able to search and index Office files. Apple praised Microsoft's moves in a statement.
Microsoft "continues to show its dedication to the Mac platform by enhancing its products for Mac users", said Ron Okamoto, vice-president of Worldwide Developer Relations at Apple.
For a detailed first look at iWork, read our preview, and for comparison you can also read our full review of the latest version of Office for the Mac.
Talkback
I think most Mac users will feel more confident using software designed by their hardware makers. Quoting statistics is pointless at this point as iWork has only just been announced and so has approx 0% market share.
Uh... Ever hear of AppleWorks? Been around for years. iWork is an attempt by Apple to [finally] modernize it's productivity suite.
While PAGES is being semi-sold as a word processor, it's really a very nice home-home office mini desktop publishing software - certainly better than AppleWorks and much, much cheaper than INDESIGN/XPRESS which the average home office-home user is not going to need anyway.
PAGES is really for flyers, family newsletters, graphics, etc that you would output on your inkjet printer ... it doesn't do it justice to just say it has 50 templates because you think of what's avaialble in WORD and how kludgy and how completely non WYSIWYG those are.
And instead of having to first draw a text or graphc box, you can select the number of columns you want and then start dragging in graphics. It just works.
I did not see if it could output to HTML but if it could - it would be the best personal web page designer for the Mac since PageMill.
It is also a straight word processor, of course.
Does it replace WORD? Frankly, if you think your kids are going to be working in an office - you need MS OFFICE. Even if you're not as expert, you need to be able to tick off that you know WORD, EXCEL and POWERPOINT - sort of like knowing how to answer a telephone.
But if you don't have kids or you need a mini page layout program for a home/small business - you should get it. KEYNOTE kills POWERPOINT but Keynote users already know that.
You call iWork a "package"- but it isn't that...yet...notice that Steve Jobs coined it as "building" a successor to AppleWorks? I think there was method in his madness, and intelligence in the choice of words. While Apple are still "building" that successor- sure MS won't react. The minute that successor is finished--what then?
I'll be buying and using Pages over Office- and Filemaker Pro for Databse (as well as MySQL). Why do I need MS Office?