What is the crowd's opinion of Apple iWork?

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>The majority of corporate users

Not even close. The majority of people in business who launch excel don't use the features you've listed. Again, Excel is best in class and is a power-user tool, but the vast majority of users don't need it.

>It doesn't matter if I can open keynote in a browser, that doesn't help me edit it or annotate it, etc.

Fucking hell. http://www.apple.com/iwork-for-icloud/

>And yes there are windows specific Java Web apps that only run in ie8.

That's ActiveX, not Java.

Pages, which is the answer to Word, is part of iWork.

Notes is meant to match Notes on iOS and allow syncing between the two. Its basically a digital kitchen notepad that you can share with anyone and add pictures too. Notes is not designed to or meant to compete with Word.

Your words form sentences but make no sense. ;)

Are iWork & iHome applications (Photos, iMovie, Garage Band, iTunes & (arguably) Safari) bloatware? Or many of the other full, no-nag software that comes installed?

Across all platforms, synced (if you wish) and selectively (as you wish) available on iCloud. None of it forming the basis of Apple's revenue model (except perhaps iAds if you use the free streaming for Music, for iTunes).

None of which is gimped. None of which requires you give up your privacy or be monitored keystroke by keystroke, in exchange for ”free“?

There are some arguments against the Apple ecosystem. I get it. But this isn't one of them.

And again, I wish Apple wasn't the outlier by so much for their privacy vs what Google and Microsoft offer. The latter two need to up their game.

Dont know if its a good option, since I personally dont use any apple product or service, but: (http://www.apple.com/iwork-for-icloud/) If they are not tech savy but have a smartphone most likely they will have an iPhone anyways. Why isn't the normal Google Docs sufficient?

This may not be of much help but according to this support page, Appleworks documents can be opened in iWork (you can get a 30 day trial here)

Someone should point out (so I will) that you can still download a free trial of iWork from the Apple website, so you can decide whether it's right for you or not before you buy it from the App Store.

>Most people (myself included) have their windows maximised, putting the menus at the top of the screen.

Irrelevant. Read the article. It doesn't work unless the very top row of pixels is part of the target.

>big tabbed toolbars of juicy big icons

Apple loves their juicy toolbars, so the innovation I take away from that is the "tabbed" portion. Apple's approach is actually quite similar, they just prefer to piggy-back on the window manager by having tabbed floating toolboxes (sometimes these are docked to the sides of the window). See the Pages interface, for example.

Microsoft's approach has the pro that the tools always show up in a consistent place. Apple's approach has the pro that multiple sets of toolbars can be visible simultaneously.

>Giving me more reasons to bring up process lists and issue kill commands on the command line is a bad idea.

There's a GUI for kill from Activity Monitor, but you're missing the point -- that should never happen. When it does happen, the solution should be deployed automatically.

>un-mounting a drive for example

Here's what I see:

1. Mount drive (I'll mount my download of Skype, say).

2. Run application.

3. Unmount drive.

Here's what happens: http://i.imgur.com/Jxohg.png

If we wanted to remove application quitting as an explicit task, instructing the user to close the application would suffice given the Sudden Termination framework present in Lion.

The solution isn't to thrust the user's hands into the guts of the OS. The solution is to give programmers the tools to intelligently deal with the problem without user intervention, and hold them to high standards such that they'll actually do it (the controversial "don't make shit" requirements for the Mac App Store are a tool to that end).

Have you:

• rebooted, it's amazing how many probs go away with a simple reboot
• run Disk Utility & verified your disk
• run Disk Utility & repaired permissions
• deleted and reinstalled Pages (if you don't have your iWork disk, as long as you have your serial number you should be able to download the iWork Trial to reinstall- http://www.apple.com/iwork/download-trial/ )

Note: If disk utility finds problems when you verify your disk, then you can try booting into single user mode and running fsck to try and repair your hard drive. To boot into single user mode, hold down Command + S while restarting. Once you are at a command prompt, run fsck, the command is listed a few lines above the prompt. If it finds and corrects problems, run it again until it finds no problems (sometimes it does this itself). Then to restart, simply type "reboot" and press enter. If fsck cannot fix your problems, then you may need to buy a copy of DiskWarrior. Good luck.