Apple gear up further to removing their reliance on Microsoft products with a rumored word processor, back to the old days of Claris then.
Why follow the same product breakdown as Microsoft at all? Do you really need fully fledged applications for ‘word processing’, spreadsheets, presentation?
I rarely use a fully fledged ‘word processor’ and would rather see a completely different view of software, built around a modular framework with a plugin architecture for developers. These plugins could be local or distributed, like locally cacheable web services. I.E. you could remotely load a French spellchecker on demand whilst editing text.
Why not take the principal activities of desktop computing: editing (text, bitmaps, grids, video etc.); publishing (to HTML, XML, PDF); retrieving (a full text database filesystem) and make them modular components of a universal framework application, an extension of the operating system. Microsoft tried this a way back with OLE, but design innovation aside, Microsoft are constrained by their own packaging and revenue streams. I would trust a company like Apple to pull off an architectural rethink such as this with elegance and flair, it seems a shame that they are just cloning the Microsoft product line with added bells and whistles.