iWork Grabs Number 2 Office Suite Spot

January 23rd, 2006 at 2:00 PM - News by Jeff Gamet

Although it comes in at a distant second, Appleis iWork took the number two office suite position away from Corel WordPerfect in 2005, according to CNET. iWork inched up over WordPerfectis 1.6 percent market share at 2.7 percent. In comparison, Microsoft Office holds the top position with 95 percent of the market.

Despite the fact that Apple has been fairly low key about iWork over the past year, it still came in with 17.4 percent of the Mac market, compared to Office for the Macis 82 percent.

Microsoft, however, does have the upper hand in this battle, since Office is available for both Mac and Windows platforms, while iWork is available only for the Mac. Wordperfect is available only for Windows.

Office includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage. iWork includes a smaller set of applications: Keynote, a presentation application thatis similar to PowerPoint; and Pages, a kind of hybrid between applications like Word, and page layout applications like PageMaker.