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Nimbus Notes Redux
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Posted by satis
Dec 29, 2023 at 03:46 PM
Nimbus itself calls their changed focus a “profound transformation”. Their roadmap is here.
https://nimbus.nimbusweb.me/share/4244497/etd897m7ooisp1qmk0a8
Sharing and collaboration and a move to group sales makes sense because businesses pay for software, and once they do there is institutional inertia and lock-in. Consumers aren’t reliable customers, and most don’t want to pay at all, as evidenced by the popularity of free mass market alternatives from big players like Apple, Google and Microsoft, to much smaller free and freemium products like Joplin, Obsidian, Logseq, Notion, Standard Notes etc.
Posted by Dormouse
Dec 29, 2023 at 08:27 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
There’s a lot of shape shifting in the market of PKMs,
> Most of it going from personal knowledge management to
>team KM or collaboration. Nimbus (less subtle). Most of Walling’s new
>feature seem to be related to sharing information. Craft, which began as
>a writing app for iPad and Mac, now is also putting most of its efforts
>into collaboration and sharing. Those are the ones that come to mind
>first, but I’m sure there are others. Seems like they are taking the
>personal out of PKM.
satis wrote:
Nimbus itself calls their changed focus a “profound transformation”.
>Sharing and collaboration and a move to group sales makes sense because
>businesses pay for software, and once they do there is institutional
>inertia and lock-in. Consumers aren’t reliable customers, and most don’t
>want to pay at all,
It’s still profoundly irritating to find these apps changing direction and even more because it’s a trend.
I’m not convinced that it’s necessarily a great business decision - just a recognition that their previous strategies were failing.
Most of these apps are too small to break into large corporates, even if individual teams go for it. Smaller businesses maybe, where teams are task oriented (another common request from users of those apps) or working off or producing a single set of documents..
It is also a fashion among users - User U has a Friend F and wants to collaborate; frequent amongst world-builders and students. This group wants to pay even less than other groups of users.
I see these pressures within the whiteboard apps Heptabase and Scrintal. I’m not using either at the moment, so I can afford to wait and see which directions they travel and what their destinations look like.
Posted by satis
Dec 30, 2023 at 03:41 AM
Dormouse wrote:
> I’m not convinced that it’s necessarily a great business decision -
> just a recognition that their previous strategies were failing.
I’m not sure what a “great” business decision would look like but this change seems interesting given that Nimbus has been one of the top (if not the top) recommended alternatives to Evernote, and Evernote customers by all reports *have* been leaving for other platforms.
If marginal costs per additional Evernote customer were not profitable they absolutely needed to make a change, and it doesn’t take much business acumen to aim at a more profitable niche if the current approach they’ve had since 2014 was faltering.
There are so many ways to combine notes, tasks and to-dos (and project management) and so many companies in this space offering variations on the mix, often with unique features, for different markets (solo use, SOHO, work from home, corporate) that there is surely going to be a shakeout. After two years Microsoft Loop is finally generally available and ready to eat marketshare from Notion, and well-financed productivity apps that are free or have generous free tiers or seemingly subsidized pricing are causing problems for a lot of the products out there today.