Apple Trademark "Numbers"

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Another Apple trademark: Numbers

It seems there is another Apple trademark filing that might be worth checking out -- Numbers.

Earlier this week, we noted that Apple had tried to get protection for, among other things, "Mactel" and "Jam Box."

Well, AppleInsider points out that Apple also filed papers earlier this month for the Numbers trademark. The enthusiast site assumes it might be for a forthcoming spreadsheet program, along the lines of Apple's Pages word processing program.

Well, Numbers would seem to add up...
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Taken from Cnet news.com
http://news.com.com/2061-10793_3-5749800.html?part=rss&tag=5749800&subj=news

Slashdot Article
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/16/1810237&from=rss

Makes sense after all...we got Pages, Keynote, Mail, and Numbers...makes sense, good bye office! :D
 
Office won't be going away anytime soon. It's actually a product from M$ that's decent, and worth while (on both Windows and Mac). All those freebie Office alternatives are a pain, and aren't user friendly. Apple's really just wasting their time. Beat M$ with the OS, but let them handle the productivity suite.
 
Don't underestimate the power of _time_ itself. Time's a wonderful thing. Healing wounds etc. MS Office is quite _certainly_ not an easy application to start with. Now: If Apple can persuade me to persuade people to start with Pages and Numbers instead - although I personally might still use Office for some things, we might have a different view on things in five or ten years.

I hear iWork is quite a low seller, currently. Well: It's not really an office suite with Pages and Keynote, is it. Numbers is definitely needed here...
 
Office on the Mac shouldn't be too hard to beat for Apple. Has anyone noticed how slow all those apps, particularly Excel are compared to their Windows counterparts? It's a very sad day when a Celeron 433 performs calculations in Excel faster than my 1.33 GHz Powerbook.
 
kainjow said:
Office won't be going away anytime soon. It's actually a product from M$ that's decent, and worth while (on both Windows and Mac). All those freebie Office alternatives are a pain, and aren't user friendly. Apple's really just wasting their time. Beat M$ with the OS, but let them handle the productivity suite.
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Anyone who wants to talk software should read Joel Spolsky's book, "Joel on Software" - a cohesive collecting of many of the articles on his site. There's a whole section on commoditizing various parts of the computer biz. For instance, hardware companies want to commoditize software. Most network hardware companies want to commoditize off software and all computer hardware. Those who believe the web is the new GUI want to commoditize the browser. Browser manufacturers want to commoditize OSes... and on and on and on it goes.

In short, there are a lot of mindsets trying to trivialize and minimize a lot of other mindsets, and to level a playing field that is vast, diversified and filled with religious ferver about what's "right".

My *personal* opinion - (speaking only on the desktop)

Microsoft owns, and will continue to own, undisputed, the corporate and home desktop for at least the next two decades.

Apple is the *ONLY* operating system even *REMOTELY* capable of upsetting that balanace, but they need to completely reinvent the *PERCEPTION* that the general market-at-large has of them. Until then, they will still and ever be a 6% margin side note. (that's not bashing - I love my apple)

Linux will continue to live on the desktops of all 189 people, globally, who use it because they like it. It simply doesn't have *ANY* of *ANYTHING* that is needed to upset Apple who can't even upset Microsoft. It's a lame duck in a draining pond.

Much to my dismay and a *LOT* of other peoples' dismay, the Rich Client applications will begin to be more maginalized and niche-ized. Office will remain and will continue to be the king of the hill not only in Office Suites, but in *ALL* rich-client applications.

Web-based software, even for local stuff, will continue to gain favor and will *ALWAYS* be the least-common-demoninator, shiddy looking, poor-performing, standards-erratic compilation of crap that it is today - squared. Or more. I depise web-only applications, but even worse are web-only applications that use platform specific crap to build marginally usable GUIs. For an example, use Outlook Web Access via IE on Windows, then use it on *ANY* other browser. Good luck. And too many other, 3rd party sites are "This site was designed for IE version 6.xxx. If you're using another browser, click here to get the *right* one." That's total and utter shiddy sell-out, cop-out, mentality at work. Go team.
 
As a user of all office apps all day long for 10+ years I can tell you what I need and where I see countless people stumble in terms of being productive - real integration between text, spreadsheet, presentation, database, chart (Visio) and drawing/graphics. Office "seamless integration" is a joke. Sure you can do it, but it is always more hassle than it should be. ClarisWorks was truly superior in this area, but I don't see all these new apps from Apple living up to that legacy. They are pretty and somewhat easy, but not powerful. If someone wants an Office killer, I think true integration is the key. We had some discussions here somewhere on Open Doc within the past month or two - that was such a neat idea from Apple.

Don't give up on rich clients chornbe! I am on 3 projects developing rich clients right now and they are working out great. Blowing the pants off their web app replacements!
 
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that. Just supporting rich clients over web apps for business (digression from the main topic).
 
nice :D - Once numbers comes out I think I will ask my boss to buy an iWork bundle...for testing and eval purposes of course ;)

When it comes to MS office, I get it for free, at least for my work computer, since the univ. has a site license. The *major* problem for apple is compatibility. I can work in anything that will let me type my reports, check my email and reply, do my presentations, and of course crunch numbers. The major drawback is sharing those files with people on the Windows side of things that have MS office and might not be able to view those presentations/sheets/documents.

Last semester, for schoolwork, I typed everything and saved it as an RTF. Some yahoos asked me if RTFs are compatible with office w/o even trying to open them. In order for these apps to succeed beyond the few dedicated users is to have full MS office compatibility (an oximiron in itself because win-office to win-office versions lack 100% compatibility :p)


I had tried OOo and NeoOffice/J but I did not like them
 
I'm not going to knock OpenOffice, I think it's a great product, I bought it years ago when it was StarOffice before Sun bought them out. I used it on my old Linux box and my Sun workstation for years and it met all my needs and never failed me. When Sun open-sourced it as OpenOffice, it was a great move and has become the standard on Linux and Solaris, light years ahead of KDE or GNOME's native offerings. But when I moved to the Mac, I realised it didn't cut it, it felt clunky and awkward to use, I haven't tried NeoOffice/J, there was no point as we bought Microsoft Office.

I hate giving credit to Microsoft because I just don't like them dammit (said in a Cartman voice), but I've been pleasantly surprised by Office for Mac. It loads quick on my mini, has all the features I need and looks nice too. I would have even switched to Entourage if it sync'd with Apple's calendar, phonebook etc.

iWork looks great, I'd love to give it a go but the lack of a spreadsheet is a real problem. If Numbers is the spreadsheet component, I'd look at it again. If Apple are about to start treading on Microsofts feet, we may ALL have to look at it again! :) An Office suite with Apple's flair for strokes of genius sounds good to me.

(BTW I loved ClarisWorks years ago, and AppleWorks is nice, but I had real problems with my existing docs and it feels terribly dated now.)
 
iWork is very basic. I didn't like it, if Apple is hoping for a MS Office killer, they'll need to do a lot more than adding a spreadsheet program.
 
karavite said:
Don't give up on rich clients chornbe! I am on 3 projects developing rich clients right now and they are working out great. Blowing the pants off their web app replacements!
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Excellent! We're a rare breed nowadays :(
 
um. OpenOffice != StarOffice.

OpenOffice is open source, and free, and available for many platforms.

StarOffice is BASED on OpenOffice (the same way Netscape used to be based on Mozilla) but it costs money. It runs on Windows, and a number of *NIX OS' (but not OSX that i'm aware of)
 
Pengu said:
um. OpenOffice != StarOffice.

OpenOffice is open source, and free, and available for many platforms.

StarOffice is BASED on OpenOffice (the same way Netscape used to be based on Mozilla) but it costs money. It runs on Windows, and a number of *NIX OS' (but not OSX that i'm aware of)
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How can I say this? You're talking out of your bottom.

StarOffice was made by a German firm Star Division, I've got the damn package RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. Sun bought them out and made it available free. They eventually released it as an open-source project, called OpenOffice, OpenOffice code now is the foundation of current StarOffice releases, I think you'll find code flows both ways.
 
I was under the impression that openoffice was spawned from staroffice, hence the staroffice icons on openoffice documents. Even the extentions are staroffice (.sxw, etc.)

And yes, StarOffice was from Star Division before Sun bought it. But it actually started out as WordStar from WAAY back.
 
OpenOffice spawned from StarOffice, and the code does flow both ways. The improvements in OpenOffice will find themselves integrated into StarOffice, while the ... uhm... improvements in StarOffice will not necessarily percolate down to OpenOffice. You can view StarOffice as OpenOffice++ :).

I didn't know that StarOffice came from WordStar(!). I had fond memories of that program.
 
Viro said:
Office on the Mac shouldn't be too hard to beat for Apple. Has anyone noticed how slow all those apps, particularly Excel are compared to their Windows counterparts? It's a very sad day when a Celeron 433 performs calculations in Excel faster than my 1.33 GHz Powerbook.
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True, but...

...it'll be a completely different story when they can simple rework thier Windows version for the Intel based Mac's. I'm sure then the Mac/Windows versions of Office will be very similar. Hell, we might even see things like Access finally come to the Mac...
 
Viro said:
I didn't know that StarOffice came from WordStar(!). I had fond memories of that program.
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Neither did I? Are you sure?
Yeah, WordStar, flippin nora, that takes me back a bit :) Happy memories, ooh, CP/M! aah, those were the days...
 
The other two trademarks mentioned in this article interest me more.

"Jam Box" in my mind probably refers to the "Asteroid" device rumoured in the week before the MacWorld keynote in January. See http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0501expo6.html for more info.
ThinkSecret said:
From all descriptions, it appears to resemble Miglia's HarmonyAudio, giving GarageBand users an easy and affordable way to plug their instrument into their Mac.
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Of course, that doesn't mean that Jam Box is just a simple musical-instrument breakout box. We already have multi-channel support in GarageBand, which was launched at January's keynote. If a simple breakout box is all it was, why would it take this long to release?

One possible answer is that Apple has whipped up something for every budding musician's home studio to have the control and possibilities normally only available to the pros. Or perhaps it is a teribly simple device but they've spent months of discrete market research on getting its design and interface spot-on-perfect (would that surprise any of us, really?). Or possibly, the accompanying software has taken some time and effort to develop and might be a work of art in itself.

"MacTel" though had me thinking - every comment on this suggests that this is purely a spin-off result of the Intel announcement. But what if it had nothing to do with that?

That would suggest it is actually a telephony product and/or service.

Apple have already signed software deals with Motorola (to bring iTunes to their mobiles) and Nokia (for a Safari-based web-browser engine). They've also got a professional relationship with Sony-Ericcsson - remember the iSync launch in 2004? Or the Sony CEO helping to launch the "Year of HD" at this year's MacWorld keynote?

My suspicion: Microsoft's Windows for Mobiles has proven too expensive for the tastes of the manufacturers, and so Apple have offered all of these makers a single, market-proven platform to replace the trouble-laden Symbian and Series 60 operating systems and do away with the expense of developing their software in-house.

Could Apple be planning to simply spin off this entire division? If Apple is involved in all of these side-projects for mobile phone makers, then surely simply breaking off "MacTel" would be a sensible step.

Of course, I could be completely wrong.​
 
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