I'm in Higher Ed and even though I use Excel extensively and would love to see an Apple spreadsheet, I love the idea of iWork. I used AppleWorks through college and did use the Draw functionality too.

But honestly, I'm fairly glad that Apple hasn't come out with a drawing program -- OmniGraffle came with my PowerBook G4 and I'm sold. It's easy to use and pretty powerful. I consider it my secret weapon for presentations in Keynote. There are a few other decent drawing programs for OS X too--miles beyond AppleWorks IMHO.

If the file compatibility is good with iWork, I could definitely see myself ditching Office soon. I suspect I could find an Excel replacement from another third party.

I guess no one has notice this yet -- but the Pages portion of iWork reminds me a lot about a piece of software by the same name back in the NexTStep/OpenStep days. There was a piece of software called Pages by a company called Pages Software, Inc. (how original).

The concept of the Pages by Pages is pretty much the same as the "template feature" in Pages by Apple: all documents created are strictly assocated with a "Pages Design", which contain restrictions/specifications for typeface, font size, page layout, header style, body text style, table style -- every conceivable element in a text document -- that must be used with the chosen page design. The documents produced are so elegant, so professional looking, that one would probably need to spend hours and hours with a page layout program (such as PageMaker) to produce the same results that came from only about 30mins of work in Pages. The concept is, IMHO, light years ahead of what is being offered by Microsoft Word. It was my absolute favorite document creation software of all time -- because it was so simple, and so easy to use. This, incidentally, is the same concept behind TeX, in that the writer himself should not have to deal with document style, so the writer defines document elements like title and header elements and let someone else worry about how the document looks (so the content and presentation are separate from one another). The draw back to the Pages by Pages was, that there were only five included designs; and any additional designs must be created using their design creation software (read: more $$$). So the variation in terms of variety of page designs was very limited. Obviously Pages in iWork contain far more designs than the old Pages.

Of course, NeXTStep/OpenStep was never really THAT popular, (and later went away, well, bought by Apple), so Pages Software, Inc. also went away fairly quickly. I remember hearing that some company acquired Pages Software, Inc., but I don't remember who (it wasn't Apple -- I don't think). Perhaps Apple acquired the rights to the software later on; or perhaps they simply "borrowed" the idea from Pages. It would be interesting to see, whether the Pages portion of iWork really originated from Pages by Pages.

On the politics side of things, I think Apple is trying not to step on too many toes with iWork. The Mac software industry (if there is such a thing) is wierd. When Apple comes out with a piece of software that competes directly with one of the third party software company, the third party software company's software goes away, (e.g. Panic's Audion, MacAmp and Adobe Premiere, to name a few).

On the other hand, Microsoft has all sorts of software, e.g. Office, Virtual PC (now part of Office), Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, to name a few, but the third party software vendors still kept their competing software. For example, Novell Office is still available (last I recall); VMware is still alive and kicking; Opera, Firefox, still comes out with Win32 versions of their web browsers first; WinAmp among other media players still continue to be developed, even though they compete directly with Microsoft offerings. With this in mind, Apple is trying not to discourage too many third party developers here, and not to become too much of a vertical solution.

Microsoft is, as the author of this news article pointed out, a very big factor. It would not be smart of Apple to appear to be going after the same piece of territory as Microsoft office. Microsoft can simply play hardball and decide to drop Micosoft Office for Mac and that would be the end of the mainstream support for the Macs. And Macs will become even more a niche player.