Whither iWork? ★
Nigel Warren:
The fact that iWork on the Mac has lost functionality isn’t because Apple is blind to power users. It’s because they’re willing to make a short-term sacrifice in functionality so that they can create a foundation that is equal across the Mac, iOS, and web versions. It will take time to bring these new versions of iWork up to parity with what the Mac used to have. In the meantime all platforms have to live with the lowest common denominator.
This is what I think, too. Doesn’t make it any easier to stomach if you relied on features that have gone away though. And let’s see how long “short-term” is.
So, rather than add the necessary features to the iOS version of iWork, Apple chose to remove those features from the OS X version in order to bring the apps to parity. This seems completely backwards.
Moreover, this doesn't seem advantageous to the consumer at all. Who's happy about this? Is anyone saying, "Hooray! Finally the Mac version of iWork is just as crappy as the one on my iPhone!"
Somehow I doubt it.
Simplifying apps can make them better; removing features does not necessarily achieve this goal, however. But that seems to be the trend at Apple: remove features in the name of simplicity. Unfortunately, I don't see things getting any easier to use; UIs across most apps and functions in Apple's software have not, overall, gotten better despite the constant removal of features from everything from the Airport Utility to Final Cut Pro. They're now both less usable and less functional, because the focus is all wrong.
Apple's focus should be on making difficult things easier to do, not on making difficult things impossible to do.