Image () The new look of Microsoft Word in Office 2016 Visual updates include a colored top bar and a more refined bottom bar for Word, Excel and PowerPoint Outlook and OneNote did not receive visual updates. Word received the most new features while OneNote received no new features. Microsoft today updated () its Office 2016 for Mac Preview, just over a month after it first launched (), with an updated look and new features. Without iWork, Microsoft has no incentive to offer better. Without iWork, Microsoft would feel content to let OS X have a decade old version of Office with numerous features missing and a ridiculous price. Apple maximizes that pain by offering iWork for cheap or free. So when Microsoft slouches on iOS or OS X, Apple releases an update to iWork so that Microsoft feels the pain when people stop using Office.
Apple doesn't actually want to make productivity software - they just want to make sure that what their users can install is as good as what their users could get on any other OS. IWork is just a giant stick that Apple uses to smack Microsoft whenever they feel the version of Office available for iOS or OS X is less than it should be. Apple has what it takes to make a killer office productivity suite of its own.
I reason why Apple needs to be played as a second-class citizen, always being behind the Windows version by a few years.
Apple should continue to build out iWork and iWork for iCloud, adding new features and making it highly competitive with Office.