Sales of iWork Up 50 Percent in 2009

What a difference a year makes. That seems to be the take-away from new retail analysis showing a 50 percent increase in sales of iWork 2009 over iWork 2008. In the first 11 months it was available, iWork 2009 sold 50 percent more copies than iWork 2008, according to NPD Group.

Much of the credit appears to go to the popularity of Mac OS X 10.6, known as “Snow Leopard”. iWork and iLife comes bundled with the box upgrade. A single-user version costs $169 and a family-version costs $229.

“These have been, I think, pretty successful products for them (Apple), generating a lot of pretty decent average selling prices and decent revenue numbers,” Steven Baker, NPD’s vice president of industry analysis, told AppleInsider. In October, we reported how 20 percent of all Mac users had upgraded to Snow Leopard in one month after its release.

Although iWork 2009 received a 50 percent uptick in sales for the year over its predecessor, the same hasn’t held true for the 2009 version of iLife. Apple includes iLife free with new Macs. iLife 2009 sales are on par with the 2008 version, according to NPD.

The future of iWork could be up in the ‘clouds,’ if a recent Apple job posting is any indication. The possibility Apple is considering adding cloud computing to iWork 2010 comes as no surprise, given existing plans to also move Microsoft Office 2010 also down that path.

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[Via AppleInsider]

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