Re: NoteMap -- Greg, it's time for Ver. 3

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4227

Posted by gkrehel
2005-09-28 19:27:44

Steve,

I’m very sorry that we don’t have NoteMap 3 out the door and to report that it’s going to be a fairly long time before we do. Though I can understand why you would scoff at my saying so, I remain an outlining addict and use the heck out of NoteMap everyday.

So what happened to turn me into a liar, failing to deliver on my promised goal of getting out ongoing releases of NoteMap?

The number one thing that happened is I’ve learned that the market for outliners is a small fraction of what I had expect it would be. My expectation was that we would sell tons of NoteMap licenses and that our many NoteMap users would become prospects for our other software tools. The reality has turned out to be just the opposite. We sell very few NoteMap licenses each month, far fewer than we sell of our other more expensive/more complex offerings. And rather than NoteMap driving sales of CaseMap or TimeMap, it’s turned out that CaseMap and TimeMap are responsible for most of our sales of NoteMap.

Now, you could certainly argue that if there was a better or perfect NoteMap people would beat a path to our website. And you could also argue as you have above that we don’t want to risk a better NoteMap hurting sales of our other tools. But I’m afraid both arguments don’t hold water. Despite the fact we haven’t released NoteMap 3, I believe NoteMap remains a terrific outlining tool. Moreover, I don’t see some other outlining tool that’s outselling NoteMap and proving the existence of the market I thought was there and demonstrating that some different version of NoteMap would sell like hotcakes. Regarding our being fearful that NoteMap 3 would hurt sales of our other tools, that just isn’t the case. The bottom line is that when NoteMap 3 is done we won’t sell many more license than we do of NoteMap 2 and it certainly won’t dent sales of our other products. If there was a real chance that would happen, wouldn’t we pursue NoteMap with vigor? It’s all sales to us and only a matter of devoting our development resources to the products that generate the most demand and revenue.

So what’s put the wrench in NoteMap development? The fact it contributes about 2% to our revenues and, as such, we’re logically investing our scare development resources on new versions of the tools that contribute the other 98%.

Given the lack of interest in outlining, we’ve ended up giving away as many licenses as possible to schools and universities trying to revive interest. Our biggest give away was 25,000 licenses to a public school system in IL. We also gave this school system licenses for our TimeMap timeline graphing tool and I’m sorry to report that we’ve had much greater interest in TimeMap than in NoteMap. Again, you could argue that this is because NoteMap is missing key feature X or important feature Y. But you would be wrong. The sad truth is that you and I are among the .0000001% of the population that gives a darn about outlining.

Well, sorry to run on. I’m sorry that I broke my promise. And I’m sorry that NoteMap 3 isn’t out and is yet to be the primary focus of our development efforts. Despite the very few licenses we sell and the small install base for NoteMap, we do expect to bring out NoteMap 3, probably by late next year. However, I don’t expect that we’ll be making dramatic changes in the product as I don’t believe making dramatic changes will result in any meaningful sales.

For those of you who are NoteMap users, I hope you find great value in the current version of the tool. If you purchased NoteMap in expectation of it becoming something dramatically different than it is, please let me know and I’ll arrange to refund what you paid.

Finally, if you know a school system or other organization where we could advance the cause of outlining by giving them unlimited free licenses to NoteMap, please let me know.

You can reach me at

Greg

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