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Re: Single-purpose tools (was Why no MORE for Windows?)
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 238
Posted by mfischer
1999-08-26 09:35:52
In Msg# 201 Brad indicates that MORE, as a commercial product, died because there were not enough customers that would purchare a single-purpose outlining tool, rather than a publishing package, word processing package, or graphic presentation package with some sort of outline feature. Also, most of the quasi-outliners introduced our updated since 1991 that have been discussed here, like InControl, Arrange, and InfoDepot, were focused at applications to which outlining was secondary, or was just a side effect of the chosen user interface.
Perhaps the question should be whether there is now a sufficient potential customer base for a single-purpose outlining tool. Or, to ask the same question from another angle: What does it take to explain the benefits of an outliner to people who have seen nothing better than the outline mode of Word or PowerPoint? (a problem I encounter frequently, as a MORE user in organizations that have standardized on MS Office) By attempting to match a publishing or presentation package feature-for-feature, the outlining either gets too complex to be productive, or gets diluted into an alternate view of the program’s primary document rendition (as in Word and PowerPoint). Either way, the result is not useful as an outliner.
In the early 1990s, there was a much greater actual benefit to multi-purpose apps than today—even with the smaller memory footprints of the software, typical systems did not have enough memory, nor a sufficiently stable multi-tasking environment, to use a series of concurrently-open, single-purpose apps in creating primary results. The ability to do this productively has changed, but it is unclear whether user/customer perceptions have changed to match. The discussions on these pages are encouraging, but hardly representative. Anyone who bothers to post to Discuss.Outliners.Com already understands the benefits of an outliner, or is making an unusually thorough attempt to learn about them.