What a good Outliner should have
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Posted by Hugh
Mar 8, 2010 at 05:06 PM
dan7000 wrote:
>
>
>Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>>
>>An outliner, in my view, is
>>primarily a thinking and
>writing tool. As such, it should facilitate the capture of
>>your own thoughts and
>ideas, allow you to explore them with quick, easy
>>re-organization tools. It should
>allow you to change the scope of the view of your
>>information quickly, zooming in on
>details or zooming out to get the bigger
>>picture.
>>
>
>Unfortunately, there don’t
>seem to be any good contenders for providing this functionality in Windows anymore.
>Stephen, I forget what you use for Outlining, but I’m thinking maybe you have switched
>to Mac. I used ADM for a long time, and have found no good replacement.
>
>I wonder if the
>problem with Windows is similar to a problem I noticed regarding restaurants:
>
>Yesterday my wife and I were talking about the problem that there are no sit-down
>restaurants open for breakfast in downtown San Francisco before 10 am on weekends. We
>concluded that maybe Starbucks is driving full-service restaurants out of the area:
>There is at least 1 Starbucks per block in downtown SF, and Starbucks provides most of
>what most people want before 10 am (coffee and donuts). Unfortunately, they don’t
>provide what we were looking for (omelettes and sit-down service). And because
>Starbucks is there, no full-service restaurant can make enough money to stay open
>before 8 am, because they can’t sell anything to the majority of people who just want
>coffee and donuts.
>
>Perhaps in Windows, MS Word provides outliner functionality
>that’s analogous to Starbucks’s breakfast offerings. It’s just good enough to
>satisfy what the vast majority want in an outliner, and thus keeps more full-featured
>outliner offerings from succeeding in Windows. And as MS Word adds more outliner
>features, the problem will only get worse. (Just as, when Starbucks started offering
>oatmeal, the restaurant problem got worse).
>
>I’m sure that business-school folks
>probably have a name for this phenomenon. Maybe they know the solution, too. It seems
>to me the only solutions would be increasing the market for full-featured outliners
>or decreasing the cost of entry. (For instance, in Houston, where it is far cheaper to
>open a restaurant than in SF, there are tons of Starbucks and also plenty of
>full-service breakfast restaurants). Maybe Mac has a lower cost of entry for some
>reason—or maybe Word has less of a foothold on Macs.
Dan
Been cudgelling my memory since reading your very nice analogy, and I have a name long buried for at least half the phenomenon you describe: satisficing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing. That is what Microsoft is doing with its outliner, and Starbucks with its doughnuts.
H