Jim's Journal

I have been using Mac’s at home forever, and at work recently over the past few years. I was recently at Intuit – a fairly progressive software company and many of the project managers there had friends (or even roommates) at Apple – also in product development. I’ll talk about the why this happened in a minute, first let me tell you the only way to really solve this is to move completely to Microsoft Office.  Here is my point. I was recently laid off and went to do a mass mailing to many of my customers and friends (I’m 48, been in the industry for 25 years and so there are a lot of people in my contact list).  My goal was to do an email merge – not a printed mailing – who does that anymore!  Okay – yes people do print labels – my sister is getting married and had to print them and its making our mother insane – but she can use contacts for that and avery templates). So I had my newly minted MacBook Pro (had to turn in my old one to my former employer).  I went to use Pages and was in the same boat many of the people on the discussion board.  Apple’s suggestion is to use the old copy of Pages – they cleverly didn’t delete it when you upgrade (similar to iMove – when it was upgraded and took away features). So I went to use Pages ’09 but although there is print merge, that didn’t work because there is no easy way to merge to an email!  So I backed up and said – “I know this works for MS Office.”  I installed the copy of Microsoft Office – yes I purchased it, I need to work.  With this I was able to easily do my mailing but wait there is more.  In order to merge to email I had to do it with MS Outlook!  So now Apple has lost me for Pages and Email and maybe even Calendar – that’s just stupid. So if you are able to purchase MS Office – you can do this easily with MS Word and MS Outlook. The emails are beautiful with custom fields and rich text.  Apple is missing something here – they just made it really easy for me to consider a Microsoft Tablet. I’m also frustrated because I use mail all the time and the calendar – and I like the way it all syncs with my table and phone and the cloud. In fact – I’m typing this on my iPad with a Logitech keyboard – hmmm.. More on product development – I just came from a Silicon Valley company so I’ll explain. This is common – its a practice that they calculate the impact of disappointing against the cost of investing resources to provide features they feel we don’t need. In fact that last part of the sentence is the key here – there is a relative arrogance in product development, specifically product management in the Silicon Valley and that is one of condescending feelings towards the masses – after their extensive field research showing that we don’t know what we want. But they aren’t really that evil – they are looking to become directors and so they need to show strategic thinking – something bigger. In fact most are much more intelligent than me; but we all know that can come back to bite you – this may sound like a cliche but experience counts too.  And they cannot ignore that warmth is just as important as competence (read The Human Brand). The point is – they are thinking a few steps down the road, imagining how we work in 2018 not 2013.  The question is always what amount of market share and customer dissatisfaction can we allow for while still making efficient use of development resources to remain incredibly profitable and be viewed as forward thinking. And believe me – those companies are about profitability as much as changing the world (don’t let the PR fool you). Further – this is likely part of something bigger they are thinking about.  Two of the posters on the discussion board argue a good point – they are considering other apps that will plug-in or supplement Pages and why to and why not to.  I already shared that you can easily print mailing labels from contacts – it even supports Avery labels – my wife did this for several invitations for various parties. Stay with me here… so why not simply improve that function to include letters and email?  Because this is going somewhere… Imagine this – the average new user (now power user like all of us) won’t think in terms of Word Processing but rather the task at hand.  They think – “I want to send a mailing to my friends or customers”. Where do they go? They go to contacts. They create a group of contacts by tagging them and then they drag them on a template or simply start a wizard of the email they are ready to send. My point is – the functionality will likely come in the OS X or iOS – or within the contacts function, not Pages.  Microsoft has created an environment to “work” and Apple has to think differently about it.  Its the way the iPhone broke the cycle – and now we all create custom phones by putting the apps we want on it. These apps, with the new iOS7 work together even better as there are more access points via the operating system to share.  Its why they build Maps – because everything needs it and Google had control. I could go on and on. We want apps to do things and we want them all to work together. Hence convergence of the operating systems, creation of apps and eventual re-building of the web via HTML 5.0 and Responsive/Adaptive web applications/sites to do the same. iWork will be replaced by integrated apps in the cloud, in a browser, on your phone, tablet and desktop.  That, is why they made iWork free on all new Apple computers. Get you in the ecosystem and move you along from there. Of course – we all suffer while this happens but for now – this is my theory on what is going on. Jim