Cure for Apple’s Achilles Heel -- "Track Changes" in Pages Has Arrived

Last week, a little noticed update to Apple’s Pages word processing program (part of Apple’s iWork suite) was implemented, and it should have profound positive impact on Apple’s traction with business users. This should help dampen the incursion of Microsoft’s Surface tablets into Apple’s iPad market.

One of the key bottlenecks in corporate adoption of iPads as primary computers has been the inability of iPad users to edit Microsoft Word documents using the track changes feature implicit in MS Word both for Mac and for Windows, and share those changes freely with anyone using MS Word on any platform. It is a “must-have” feature for many business users, and without it, iPads have been held back from their true potential as general purpose computer substitutes in the corporate world. This weakness for Apple was accentuated when Microsoft recently released its Surface tablet which runs MS Word with track changes, followed by the announcement that Microsoft would release a version of MS Word for iPad that would not have the track changes feature.

Apple’s rollout of the track changes feature will blunt this attack by Microsoft, and remove a major impediment to wider rollout of iPads in corporations, law firms and other business users. This is very good news for Apple, since the computers these iPads will replace are mostly Windows PCs, not Macs.