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Comment by bhanu423 | Hacker News Reader

My hunch is probably there will be 2 versions maintained separately like visual studio and vs code. The version built in javascript will probably be free for personal usage, can have lesser features and probably fight for marketshare against google drive, libreoffice etc. I wouldn't be surprised if they even keep the source open. PR and market wise, this would be a great move.

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This was kind of true with OneNote up until recently. There are currently two desktop versions. One that comes with Office and looks/feels like the rest of the Office suite, and one that is made with UWP and available for free from the Windows Store. That one looks/feels a lot like the Android/iOS OneNote app.

However, they've announced that they're EOLing the Office version, with bug fixes through 2020 and security updates through 2025, and are continuing forward with the UWP version.

Perhaps we will see a future where they EOL the other Office applications in favor of new versions that are more similar to the iOS/Android versions. The iPad versions of Excel and Word are already pretty good.

https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/office-365/161295/microsoft-r...

Well that's disappointing. The simple ribbon in the new OneNote feels like such a step back from the ribbon UI in OneNote 2016.

It does say users will be able to enable the full ribbon UI still, so I suppose I will have to do that. Hopefully they don't deprecate that feature.

In the past the reasoning to replace the menu system with ribbons completely and not allowing to switch back is the understandable desire to not having to maintain and test two different UIs all the time. Two different ribbons may still work, as the ribbon already has information about "importance" or "prominence" of each item, but I fear eventually there'll be only one remaining in the future.

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