Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

With desktop computers slowly shifting to make a place for tablets, Apple is skating to the puck:

This feels like the reset Apple did with iMovie a few years back:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=640314

Apple made iMovie easier [1], and ultimately reduced the price of Final Cut Pro to $300, which is in the range of high-end amateurs or power users.

In this case, though, I don't think they care about the power user, because the threat/opportunity is down market in Google Docs. I think they are simplifying the product to reach a lot more people, rather than retain the loyalty of a small group of users who use Pages as a full-blown word processor. I.e., they want to convert a percentage of their iOS users to Pages.

Apple says they have sold 600 million iOS devices [2]. If you assume 300 of those devices are active, and Apple coverts 3% of those users, they have 9M new Pages users. If those iOS users happen to use the Mac version of Pages, even better. But they want to convert people away from Android/Google Docs as much as they want to shift people away from Windows/Microsoft Word.

[1] "Easier" is subjective, but as a long-time user of iMovie, _I_ found it easier, so I'll use that term here.

[2] http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/10/4415258/apple-announces-60...

> Apple is skating to the puck

Given the rest of your comment, I think you meant ‘Apple is skating to where the puck is going to be’.

No, I think the puck is already at two of the three platforms they targeted with the new release: web and desktop. I think mobile/tablets isn't there yet, but that is changing, too. Microsoft isn't getting much traction yet, but they're moving there, too.

Hmm, I think you don’t really understand the Gretzky quote “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been” and how it’s used in this context.

If you skate to where the puck is now, you’re just following others, stuck in old ways, and you’ll always at a competitive disadvantage (it takes time to skate – if you skate to where the puck is now, you’ll never be able to hit it.) If you’re skating to where the puck is going to be (when you get there), you’re taking the lead, you’re anticipating change acting before it happens.

In other words, they're aiming for the market of people who don't want to pay for a word processor.

(But who do want nice hardware.)

They're aiming for a market that is willing to pay $300 to $600 for a iPad, and a free word processor sweetens the deal a bit. The fact that you can access your docs on your mac or in browser (also for free) is nice sweetener, too.

Writers don't compose on a tablet. No one who does any significant amount of writing does so on a tablet. They use keyboards. A word processor is a tool for writing. It should optimize for the input devices used by writers.

A lot of people use keyboards with their iPad.

A lot of people do, but not a lot of professional writers do.

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