(The)BrainDead? (Hopefully not yet)

Posted by 22111
Oct 25, 2020 at 10:40 AM

To proceed with my analysis of the market (just read “Donovan” - it’s beyond me why people are allowed to name themselves after “celebrities”, living or dead ones: that’s overly preposterous at least… -: no comment for filth, except that in their time, they deleted LOTS of posts over there, as allegations in the “rest” of the posts indicated, and when I they did that to me, for a post, I considered myself being “thrown out” - since not being able to speak freely is being silenced since from then point on, auto-censorship sets in; so technically, they never threw me out, they didn’t have to, I was thru with them - here, I simplified that situation, back 10, 12 years, but it’s clear that people who’re not ashamed to publicly identify themselves with real artists, real discoverers and the like, jump, as some doggie, onto any sausage you hold in their direction: very amusing!) (Btw, 22111 is a Hamburg, Germany post code…) So…
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TB’s naming could be identified as preposterous (, too, albeit probably not “overly”, in their case): An item / record is a “thought”, and the whole set (by file) is a “brain”, or then, “plex”? (I think that’s used as a synonym, by them? Probably, at some point in time, “brain” really appeared overly (sic) preposterous to them? ;-) )

On the other hand, those weird (sic) denominations could indicate indeed that initially, TB had been meant as sort of a “think machine for restraint projects” or something (cf. supra Mr. Scholz), but I think they’re way beyond that alleged self-imposed limitations of their beginnings, and, as said, they do a lot of marketing speech diverting from such limitations indeed.

Speaking of marketing speech(es) ((on) YT, among those), TB have been very active over some time, whilst, e.g. from IS, “you hear nothing” - ?, not much anyway.
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WHY there is no progress in outliners and similar? (And yes, I think, that should be a core subject in a specialized forum like this.) Let me put some ideas, just implied above, into explicit wordings.

As said/implied/thought-on/whatever, UR hasn’t added something “new and useful” for years, its developer trying to “get by, get along” indeed, and there’s a phenomenon of interest here, his main work on UR allegedly may be, “how to stay on par with web browser developments”... (Ditto for Outlook, OL “integration” - as far as that gets, with UR?... Or then, he doesn’t do so much, after all?)

And, ditto (i.e. for the “has been treated by me above in some way” aspect), Treepad has done the “English leave” (which the Brits call the “French” one): it’s gone without saying good-bye, whilst, desktop-functionality-wise, and with its “Business” variant at least, it had been one of the “major” offerings - visually, it had always been atrocious indeed…

MyBase is, by its (again: desktop) functions, a major player, too, but then, people (i.e. web third parties) say it’s not stable, or then, has not been stable, even with just a 4-digit number of items per file… (speaking of v. 5 if I remember well, and v. 6 now probably more robust?), and then, there’s the “China thing” for some - I won’t go into “political” considerations here, but for some, the respective “background” of the developers “counts”, it seems, from reading of some “web comments” speaking…

There’s Whizfolders, again some “serious offer”, judging from start, but then… no “really active development”, as “they” call it…

As for MI, it’s, as far as I know, the only one, together with RN (all abbreviations in full wordings above), which allows for “linking to paragraphs”, which is really, REALLY useful for many - no: MOST! - use cases, but MI’s v. 5 wasn’t stable in my experience, and v. 6 was even less, vanishing from my screen in less than 5 minutes, with just a handful of items and playing around with its “attributes” / “columns” functionality, not speaking of the fact that its “cloning” feature being a joke - and whilst RN doesn’t have any cloning feature to begin with.

MI’s developer having announced, some years ((?) now) ago, that he’s working on a total re-write, v. 7, which, according to his words, would also allow him to fulfill MI users’ expectations to have some sort of a “mobile” version, i.e. on IThings, Android devices… - whilst, as said, and at the very least of individual, non-corporate users, there’s mobile (not ??? really ???) Win 10 devices weighting around just 1,000 grams.

I don’t speak of “The Journal” and other toys here; “PageFour” ‘s developer then developed “Atomic Scribbler”, and with the most expensive framework he could get… for just then quickly making it available for free, after having seen the relative “lack of response”, such things being very, VERY far from being “good enough”.

Again, ADM: from what I’ve read on the subject, too late indeed, it seemed to have been something really good, “with a real perspective”, and then again, the developers abandoned it… whilst the developer of “Surfulater”, another (but perhaps too much of a?) “special” thing, then went off to a “hierarchical tags” offering, which, as all “hierarchical tag” things, is a dead-end (for the user that is, and anyway, the developer must have made millions of bucks with his editor before, so financially, would allegedly by into the - enviable! - “hobby stage” now.

As for MS OneNote, well… and even on Donationcoder, that “endless” ON thread has come to an end, finally, it seems… Too much crippling a tool is never a good strategy; in the case of EN, the aspect of (outrageous) pricing adds to the problem…
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So, what can we “learn”? Desktop applications are doomed, right? People don’t give them the benefit of the doubt anymore, but simply discard them in their buying process?

And while some additional (sic) sales for such applications such as UR are very welcome by the respective developer, no one “in his mind” could, seriously, expect reasonable sales from some new desktop (i.e. desktop-only) “outliner” (or similar, even with group functionality), as “good” as their tool might otherwise be: the time window for marketing such tools has simply been closed, by the “modern” expectation of a) the masses and b) obviously even of those people who have “demands beyond”, as for the excellence of their tools, but who obviously are blind of the fact that even for $1,000, they could have a reasonably powerful, reasonably light, full-functional Windows notebook, with the same functionality “on the read” as they get in their office, home-office, whatever resident place of work.

(I leave out, in my considerations, the “multiple-platform” NoteCase Pro, my experience (desktop, always) with it having been just too atrocious, and then, I don’t see its having been adopted in big numbers by “professional” users…)
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Thus, “motivation” to “do something from scratch on”, “better” or not, nears zero, from the observation of the market, from its successes, its failings, and let alone IM being, obviously, a niche phenomenon which then would need high 3-digit prices in order to be viable (just a reminder: MS Word and “WordPerfect” prices have neared the 4-digits once, for individual seats…), which then would necessitate them to be “almost perfect” from start on, and no individual developer can ensure that.

And then, professional developers have been in very high demand, for some years now, so that their possible motivation to “work on spec” is inexistent, whilst people who hire them will be well-advised to have some “viable” project in hand, also and especially from the marketing aspect which, after all, will make of break the venture.

And then, some will remember that, years ago, I asked for the deeper meaning of EV then having, allegedly, around 150 developers, for such a minimum of output… their alleged mismanagement in that time being an alleged outlier indeed, the question arises though how much development work just some developers can supply, let alone the output of single, lone developers, being qualified in just some areas or not, the area to be “covered” being just too broad:

Lately, I got the info that the developer of a quite simple, “specialized” csv tool has allegedly made more than 20,000 times more than 30 bucks with it, i.e. around 700,000 minus taxes, and for a tool that, again, has lesser functionality than MS Excel (even in that specialized respect, again), but is just “simpler to handle” than MS Excel in this respect, again (see above): people pay for ease of access to some badly needed subset of functionality, not for functionality in the end - IM, on the other hand, incorporates too many fields to be handled by “just some”. (Users want browser (i.e. not just text clipping), OL, Pdf integration today… and then, that weird (sic) 3-to-4 “platforms” expectation, or better, 2-to-3 one: Apple users demand iPad, too, whilst Windows users fluctuate between iPad or Android and would like to have both, in the end…

When more and more web applications come out and take over (see the major content of this forum, lately), and just lately, another one of the higher-brow offerings in IM told the press any of its server offerings would only last for some months from now now (Atlassian with Confluence (sic), Jira, Bitbucket: all “cloud” then, and that cloud thing had me discard Confluence early on…): so, and considering the overwhelming success of such “solutions”, the question is, do even developers like MI’s the right thing still, when they (try to) develop for “several platforms”, instead of “going cloud”?

Even at less than 100 (60?) bucks plus VAT, IM software isn’t “viable” anymore, as far new developments are concerned, and for some developers, even additional sales in that price range don’t “do it” for them anymore, so they close shop - whilst on the other hand, some of us would easily spend 1,000 plus VAT, or even a little bit more, for getting something that really lived up to our expectations, the irony being that “help creation software” is in that price range but can not being used for more general IM needs, unfortunately, and Confluence having gone the web way very early - there again, there had been “promises” though I had been very well aware of as a prospective customer.

So much, for the time being, for my alleged pathological “TB fixation”... It’s all and rather about market analysis and why we can’t expect much anymore (and why I have not been foolish enough to enter the game a second time, being too late at the table, as anybody else would be), except from the 9 AI corporations, and which will allegedly not leave alone or data though, and yet… they ain’t wandering on giving lane either, and as soon as they get what they’re after, their further efforts to really “help us” out with our needs will quickly drop…

Like, Hm, falling rain (Donovan 1990).