Gassée ranting about the latest iWork

Jean-Louis Gassée got stung by the iWork feature removal.

It’s well worth your time to read his article and I do agree with him about the lacking communication from Apple about this.

What is most surprising to me is that it should be that difficult to communicate to the client. As they are so clear and concise to communicate the improvements, why don’t they just mention as well that if you upgrade you’ll lose some (standard) features?

Apple is one of the few companies in the world who are cutting features to obtain a different advantage later in the roadmap but they do a very bad communication about these changes. And even more now with the auto-updates on the mac and iOS it’s even more important to communicate this.

Why can’t they communicate it at least on these places?

• In the product description in the App Store (Due to big changes in this release an old copy of your software is still available at blablabla location)
• In the welcome screen from the app: And old copy of your app has been saved in blablabla location

After a .1 release you could remove these warnings as you might expect that most customers have upgraded at that moment or are new users. Especially with a fast adaptation rate.

And another point of Gassée, the testing. It seems that with the extended secrecy on Apple’s part, one of the main fatalities is the testing. they have to get this back up to track because with the latest app releases there have been more then plenty of bugs (anyone tested Mail for Mavericks with Gmail ?)

Read as well Lessig take on the whole communication issue. Will 2013 be the year of the communication-gate for Apple?