A Theory of Outliner Software Market Development

Posted by Vincek
Oct 10, 2011 at 03:42 PM

I am new, so let me just say thank you to all who have posted and have helped educate me on outline software options and functionality.

Mostly by default and lack of knowledge of alternatives, I have been a user of ActionOutline for several years. I considered using it to write a book and ran into many limitations, so I did some exploration to see what else is out there and found this forum.

Over the past few months I have also become a regular user of Evernote. Evernote is great for capturing information, but its lousy for manipulating that information into a hierarchical structure (that is inherently needed for a book).

Thus, what I have been hoping to find is a software organizer that has great integration with Evernote. No cigar… at least yet.

This has been an eye opener. There is no clear winner in outline organizer offerings. It is fragmented among dozens of confusingly similar and flawed offerings.

By my observation, Evernote has become a dominant player in a closely adjacent market. It has many powerful advantages—10 million users, a large pot of capital to expand, cross platform integration across desktops and mobile devices.

Why aren’t there outliner programs that have figured out the value of integrating with Evernote, similar to what Curio has done with mindmapping software (for Mac only). Evernote has opened its API.

My theory is that whatever outliner software develops a decent integration with Evernote will be cream that rises to the top. I would be happy with crude outlining functionality if only it integrated with the powerful capturing capabilities of Evernote.