Apps are Apple’s Achilles’ heel

Apple has neglected its iWork suite of office productivity apps — Pages, Numbers, and Keynote — for half a decade. So when Apple CEO Tim Cook said in September that a new version was finally coming to the Mac, as well as to iOS, users were happy. But that new version quickly angered Mac fans as it dropped a bunch of functionality to be more like the iOS version, which was improved over its predecessor. And we all had to ask: Why does OS X have to suffer for iOS to succeed? Doesn’t Apple get that these apps need to get much better?

Eighteen months earlier, Apple released Final Cut Pro X, a new version of its industry-standard video-editing software used by all the Hollywood studios and effects houses that dropped a lot of pro functionality, creating a huge outcry among one of Apple’s most loyal user segments — and one of the industries that served as an ethusiastic poster boy for Apple. Although Apple decided to bring back the old version, today it has largely lost the professional video-editing market (Adobe Premiere has supplanted it) after wounding those users too deeply. It made sense to treat iMovie as the movie editor for the rest of us and Final Cut Pro as the movie editor for Hollywood pros; it didn’t make sense to cripple Final Cut Pro X to target … I don’t who, maybe film students?

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These apps reflect what I call Apple’s Goldilocks problem: Some are too much, some are too little, and few are just right. When it comes to apps, Apple isn’t getting the right fit.

Likewise, it didn’t make sense in 2005 to target iWork to Microsoft’s negotiators rather than to users. And it certainly didn’t make sense in 2013 to make iWork less capable on the desktop than it had been, even if Apple’s stated reason (compatibility across all version) is to be believed. If anything, the goal should have been to make iWork for Mac an Office-killer, taking advantage of Microsoft’s bloatware flaws in Office 2013 and its lack of a good office product for non-Windows devices. Yes, iWork for iOS should have been improved, but it should not have defined the Mac version’s functional ceiling. I guess we’re lucky that Apple didn’t use iWork for the Web as the compatibility ceiling. Although it’s a very slick Web app, it’s a shadow of the real thing, especially in its poor support for key metadata, such as styles and revisions tracking.

Apple should have focused on making each version “just right.” And it should have focused on document portability. Portability is a big deal, and Apple is usually bad at it. For example, iTunes playlists were only recently made compatible across OS X and iOS in iTunes, photo albums remain incompatible across the iOS and OS X versions of iPhoto, groups don’t work the same way between iOS and OS X for Mail and Contacts, and there are similar gaps across iOS and OS X for GarageBand and iMovie.

A history of mainly mediocrity Apple’s track record in the world of apps has been uneven for years, sending the clear message that the apps are the redheaded stepchildren for the media, computer, and mobile giant. Those of us who followed Apple in the 1990s remember the on-again, off-again commitments to Apple Works and FileMaker (later spun off into its own company, still owned by Apple, where it has thrived in its niche). Even after Steve Jobs’ reinvention of Apple in the early 2000s, that conflicted relationship has persisted.

But not completely. iMovie and iPhoto on the Mac are key apps for most home users, bringing unprecedented functionality and ease of use for activities that have long had terrible apps from dozens of companies, both no-namers and marquees like Adobe Systems. Apple’s Mail and Calendar apps for OS X have improved dramatically in recent years, making Microsoft Outlook unnecessary for most Mac users. It’s true that Apple’s large set of included apps in OS X and iOS are far better than what Microsoft and Google provide on their platforms, even though Microsoft’s paid apps rule both Windows and OS X,, and Google’s many services (and some apps like Chrome and Maps) are widely used on many platforms.

Still, Apple’s track record with software has been half-hearted. When Apple reinvented the dormant Apple Works as iWork in 2005, the intent seemed to be to create a backup option in case Microsoft stopped producing Office for Mac. You might recall that a key part of the 1997 deal betwen Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s just-returned Steve Jobs was a five-year commitment to developing Office for Mac, a must-have for Apple to have any hope for business use, even if just for work-at-home use. Once that deal expired, Microsoft’s public commitment waffled, and Apple needed both a backup and a stick in its Microsoft relationship. Microsoft continued to develop Office for the Mac, though always with inferior capabilities, given its need to hedge its bets both in terms of where the PC growth was and to fend off antitrust regulators.

iWork started with not much focus on its users’ needs, but the 2008 version was a major leap forward and began to suggest that Apple could develop a world-class office suite of its own. Then it came out with a minor update a year later and … that’s it, until this year.

In the meantime, the pioneering iTunes media center remains the most cohesive media-library offering on any platform, but it suffers from a mashed-up user interface that struggles to handle all its components nicely. And the iBooks Author publishing tool released in winter 2012 has a maddening combination of cutting-edge capabilities, unnecessary limitations, and awkward user experience that you see to a lesser degree in the iWork suite, iPhoto, Preview, and even iMovie.

Ironically, in iOS, the iWork suite demonstrated early on that the iPad was a serious business tool, and it remains the best mobile office productivity suite on any platform. (I’m not counting the more capable Office 2013 on Windows tablets because it’s unusable in a touchscreen environment, making its functional superiority moot.) Keynote in particular is amazingly powerful and easy to use on iOS, as it is on OS X. (Pages and Numbers suffer by comparison on OS X, perhaps because Jobs was a heavy Keynote user.)

Likewise, iMovie is a really good mobile editor on iOS, GarageBand is a really good music editor and mixer on iOS, and iPhoto and iBooks are both pretty good at what they do. Yet other apps such as Reminders, Notes, Remote, and Contacts are mediocre, both on iOS and OS X.

Apple’s Achilles heel in the new platform war There’s been a lot of attention paid to the decline of the Windows PC in favor of tablets, as well as the death of the BlackBerry as it ignored the iPhone. The old clients are giving way to the new ones. But it’s more complex than that. The new platforms extend well beyond the device and its OS. It’s an ecosystem battle involving applications, cloud services, and protocols.

In the Apple world, iTunes, iCloud, and the App Store form the glue for iOS and OS X devices, with a common set of services and content available to all. Protocols like AirPlay and AirPrint extend that ecosystem into a second ring of devices. Apple’s big missing piece is the Web, which should be a portal for users of other platforms to enter the Appleverse. iTunes does that a bit for music and videos, and the new iWork for Web may be intended to do that for basic office productivity. But either could be disrupted by Microsoft or Google.

Microsoft’s Office 365 is lamer than Apple’s iWork for the Web. That’s because Office 365 not really a Web editing suite, but rather is a download service for the traditional Office apps (like Adobe’s similarly lame Creative Cloud.) The Web apps of Office 365 are much less functional, and until that changes, it’s hard to take the Web part of Office Web Apps seriously. But Microsoft is gaining some ground here, and I have no doubt it will continue to improve. Microsoft’s Xbox Music and Video also fall behind Apple’s iTunes service, and it lacks the kind of addictive peer-to-peer sharing capabilities of AirPlay; its adoption of Miracast in Windows 8 suffers from Miracast’s performance and compatibility woes. Microsoft has a strong server platform in Windows Server, Skype, and Exchange, but it’s let SharePoint become a complex, single-platform morass.

Google’s Drive is even less capable, making a mockery of Google’s Web-first pretensions. Google did buy Quickoffice — whose iOS word processor and spreadsheet editor were better than Apple’s Pages and Numbers — to fill in the gap in its Web app. But then it reworked Quickoffice to be basically a portal to Google Drive, making you use Drive for online documents even though it’s barely functional. Although Quickoffice still has good local editing capabilities, you’re dissuaded from using them. When it comes to its media component, Google barely registers. And its Chromecast device for video playback lacks the peer-to-peer functionality of Apple’s AirPlay, just as its new Android devices suffer from Miracast’s disappointing state and older devices from Google and its Android licensees suffer from widely inconsistent, often proprietary protocols.

If Apple has a compelling, high-quality suite of apps across OS X, iOS, and the Web, with some key pieces on Windows and Android, it could easily emerge as the dominant platform in users’ personal lives, plus get a big share of the small business market plus a reasonable share of the enterprise, where its iPad and iPhone are leaders. I get that Apple offers the broadest set of apps for its platforms compared to Microsoft and Google, but it’s an uneven mix that isn’t a good enough base for the future.

As long as Apple can’t figure out whom all its apps are for, so they can be “just right,” it risks losing the huge opportunity it created for itself with iTunes, the iPhone, and the iPad. Apple’s biggest advantage is that Microsoft and Google are also getting this wrong.

This article, “Apps are Apple’s Achilles’ heel,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.