iWork a quiet hit with sales up 50% this year

While no one was looking, the Apple iWork suite jumped 50% in sales this year over 2008 levels. The retail sales analysts at the NPD Group say much of the current popularity of the program stem from the sales of Snow Leopard, which bundled the productivity apps for U.S. $169.00 for a single-user version and $229.00 for a family set.

AppleInsider quotes Steven Baker, NPD's V.P. of industry analysis, saying "These have been, I think, pretty successful products for them (Apple), generating a lot of pretty decent average selling prices and decent revenue numbers."

I really like the iWork apps. My last book was mostly written on Pages, then sent off to the publisher as an RTF formatted file. Keynote is very powerful, and doesn't have the tired old look of PowerPoint.

Apple is apparently working on moving a good deal of iWork to the cloud, and Microsoft is taking the same path with Office.

[via AppleInsider]