MindManager back for Mac

Posted by Jan S.
Mar 24, 2018 at 08:48 PM

Also to the “off-topic” discussion. Many people don’t realize this but the big money for tech companies is (like for any other company) in government contracts. Which is probably why the classic OneNote program is dying. Microsoft wants to get in all classrooms, not just in the US but world wide. So they stripped down the app and added special features for teachers and students. Then they can either sell lots of surface tablets to school district—- and the corresponding professional services: cloud infrastructure, training etc.—- or get license fees from third parties (which is how Microsoft got big) like Lenovo, Dell etc. for their computers.

The importance of “data” seems—- to me at least—- very overrated. I can’t see a logical reason why companies wouldn’t be dissatisfied with Facebook or Google Ads in a couple of years. Just like they have been with magazine and newspaper ads previously. I think we are in the early stages of big data right now and many people can get away with making authoritative statements. There is really no good way of testing how reliable the predictions models are, that supposedly revolutionize marketing. But there is an obvious incentive for the people who develop them to overstate their effects. For example by using ridiculous multiplicators—-as in the example given in the thread above: paying 2$ for a single row in a spreadsheet. That would only be justifiable if one could expect to sell products with an average value of well above 2$ per person, which seems unreasonable to me. But selling more toothpaste by using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning sure sounds good—- right now.

Also, if more and more services move the cloud, then there could also be positive effects—- at least for the people in this forum. It would create more incentives for smaller developers to work on desktop software. Just like the proliferation of streaming created a vinyl revival.