After 30 + years in Information Technology I have gracefully surrendered to the thought that I will never fully grasp all the thinking that goes into software product development & marketing. I know there are always competing priorities within companies and that markets can be fickle. I'm just determined to stay agile and flexible and avoid the heartbreak of following in love with certain software.

nathanb wrote:

bartb wrote:
>IMHO Excel and OneNote were the
>best applications MS ever made. But OneNote never did seem to get much
>love from its parent.
>

100% agree. OneNote was a revelation to me in 2008. That was back in
the golden years when desktop software could be expected to keep gaining
powerful features instead of just 'ease-of-use' features. So I watched
in dismay for over a decade as OneNote just became 'more accessible' to
the masses by becoming more slick but less powerful.

It does make me appreciate Excel even more as a platform that didn't
become watered down for greater market-share. It's pretty unique in
that 95% of its users just use it for the gridlines yet power users can
push it as hard as they want. It's hard to think of another application
that can straddle that fence so well.

Now software tends to be designed for the most common use case only with
no power-user options. I feel like that's been the influence Apple has
had on the tech world. They mastered 'slick and simple for the average
user' with amazing growth results and the other big players are copying
that. Those of us who want more out of our software can no longer look
to the big players to fulfill that need. That's why I love this forum.

Microsoft hasn't added any OneNote power features in the past 10 years
besides forcing everyone to store their notebooks on their cloud and
tweak their interface to make it look a little cleaner. But the options
you have to organize, tag, and link your notes remains the same if not
worse.

I'm on this forum because of OneNote as it was the gateway drug to
CRIMPing. It was OneNote that showed me how wonderful it was to tag my
own content, to link between it, and leverage inline tables and
collapsible outlines to give a ton of depth and flexibility.
Fast-forward a decade and it's not even trying to play in that sandbox.

I'm annoyed that OneNote and Evernote have abandoned power users...as I
always thought we were the best evangelists. I've gotten dozens of
people to use OneNote over the years. But marketing departments have
apparently concluded that it isn't worth the investment to cater to
users like us. Forget the tagging system, better to put those resources
into offering new pen pallets to appeal to college doodle-bugs.

Excel is for everyone, from the most casual user to the geekiest. In
that way it's a unicorn.
Notion is the Excel of the PKM world right now. It's accessible to
everyone with big depth for geeks.
OneNote in 2007 was for everyone...but now it's only for casual users.
Roam, and most apps discussed in this forum, is for us.