Roam Patrol!

Posted by nathanb
Oct 19, 2020 at 07:05 PM

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.