best outliner you use? (2018)

Posted by Jan S.
May 9, 2018 at 08:28 AM

Honestly, I think software you should be a lot more expensive. While there is a constant flow of new software and Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc. can claim that they have X million apps available on their stores, most of those are just bad. As the price of software declined, so did the quality. The only companies that can afford to hike up their prices are ‘big players’ like Adobe or Apple who made their customers believe (counterfactually) that they need their “apps”. I cannot really think of any exceptions. Sometimes Scrivener is mentioned as a kind of success story. I don’t use Scrivener but it looks like it is on a very slow release cycle. (Also psychologically: Scrivener is advertised specifically for writing books. Many people seem to engage in the delusion that they could write a book and then probably buy a Scrivener license and stop using it after a couple days or weeks—similar to how a gym makes money: collecting dues from the people who never train but are to lazy to cancel.) Another example would be Tinderbox but I don’t know anything about their actual revenue or business model.

Also “coding” has become more popular, while “programming” is dying. Most new programs in the productivity space are quick and dirty high-level language + some web-framework implementations without any thought about the future. Which can easily be gathered from the hundreds of blog posts that go like: “We went from idea to launch X days”. Many of those stupid JavaScript apps cannot even run offline or export data in a usable format but they sure have emoji support and run all your notes, appointments etc. through some ‘analytics software’ to improve your “experience”. It’s all about the “experience” (coding) instead of solving relevant problems (programming).

The most obvious problem—which is very apparent on this and other forums—is that most people are just not willing to pay substantial amounts of money for software. By substantial I mean somewhere between 200 and 1500$ for a license. To me the choice between running a small software company like a one-person operation + paying for health insurance + retirement fund + no vacation time etc. on the one hand and getting a solid pay-check as a programmer at some company seems obvious when the conditions are: (1) People complain about the software being to expensive, (2) People post their extremely negative “reviews” of the software all over the internet and encourage other people not to use it because the developer, for example, wasn’t nice enough when they used the support e-mail to ask stupid questions to check the response time, and, (3) big companies offering “free” software to compete with that can be used to fill up a 3500$ MacBook just as well.

Conclusion: It will only get worse from here on. You are on your own. If you want quality software you will either have to write it your self or hope that somebody else will (basically sacrifice themselves for you). [Maybe programmers could also form communities in Thailand or somewhere similar to take advantage of lower living costs and work remotely for the international software market…..........]