Omni Group Layoffs
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I never fully understood why we do not have the "a good tool saves me x hours, and makes me happy while doing my work so I should pay for it" culture. SW engineers are pretty well paid and companies themselves have decent margins so this penny pinching tendency is upsetting.
Don't we spend on software, though? Software spend is surely in the billions, if not tens or hundreds of billions a year. As consummate consumers of software, I'd think software engineers are more likely to spend money on software than the general public (and more likely to use open-source software as well).
a. Debuggers
b. IDEs
c. Querying Tools
d. Text editors
e. Source control tools
f. Build systems
The market for development tools does not look particularly vibrant based on the above.
The huge problem with them is that they're proprietary. They don't have the wide usage of the open source equivalents, so debugging problems is hard. If you want to develop at home, at work and on a PC in a lab, you have to navigate licensing issues. If you want to do a build and test as part of your CI process, you have to navigate licensing issues. Then you move jobs and they've bought into a different, incompatible proprietary system and you have to learn it all over again.
The open source options are actually good enough, and the advantage of being able to have the entire build system on a new computer after running a few apt-gets and downloading some free software is huge. The skills persist across jobs, I can use them at home for my own projects, I never have to worry about licenses expiring.
But, these are all pretty easy to start for a single hacker who can recruit help to expand an open source version.
Developer tooling (Developer machines, IDE's, source control, CI, issue tracking, etc): Pay for the best.
The product: Only use FOSS. Give back by contributing and by making some of our work available as FOSS.
For the product, especially for the client-side, I just see it as too risky to include proprietary software. Even if the pricing is fine for right now, it can easily change later (got burned by both Google Maps and Mapbox years ago), and in some cases even prevent you from using different pricing models because of base costs it may add per user.
On the infrastructure side I'm more flexible, but even there: 1. Stick to commoditized services as far as possible, where the pricing is predictable. I'd include most cloud services in this, and most "enterprise" offerings not. 2. Avoid hard vendor lock-in if feasible, but only up to a point (don't build something from scratch just to avoid the lock-in).
Proprietary software lock-in in your product can generally be very damaging when things go wrong. I know of one company which was so throughly fucked over that they had to halt all feature development for 6 months while they were busy building a replacement. Cost them enough time and customers to a competitor. For non-product stuff, replacing proprietary software is a bitch but far less disrupting.
The potential customer was a software company, meaning that the only way they make money is if others pay—which they were unwilling to do themselves.
I don't want to justify the "cheapness" of the software users, which is certainly excessive, but the feeling of ownership of a physical object is still very different from software.
For example, you can easily lend your toolbox to a friend, your hammer won't ever stop functioning through no fault of your own, you can re-sell or gift a chainsaw if you want to get a new one.
Since software is immaterial, we've ended up in a situation where these basic things don't work, people do not feel like they actually _own_ software, and thus feel less motivated to buy it.
And I don't know about you but the first thing I do when I get a paper manual is go online to try to find a PDF version. Seems more like a downside than a value-add?
Personally, I own most of Omni's software, but I won't be upgrading to new versions when they come out.
OmniFocus was once the cornerstone of my productivity. It was expensive and I didn't use the scripting aspects of it, but it provided value. The Apple ecosystem didn't bother me too much, but it was a pain, and I was doing more and more work on my Windows machine and going to my phone to add/update tasks was creating friction.
They came out with OmniFocus web, which would allow me to solve the issue... but it's too damn expensive. I've already spent ~$175 for licenses to OmniFocus for Mac and iOS, now you're asking for $50/year on top of that.
The competitors are hungry in this space, and Todoist offered more for less. I switched to their premium plan, which is cheaper than OmniFocus web itself, let alone the full subscription and includes clients for everything, plus a web-only client as a last resort.
The same pattern holds true for the rest of their software lineup. I own most of it except OmniPlan.
TL;DR. Omni isn't providing value compared to its (paid) competitors, to say nothing of FOSS.
I happily pay for it.
I have used it for years and years, for normal stuff like software diagrams and business process and shit like that, but also for stuff like floor-planning my house and doing mockups to decide what furniture and TVs to buy, to making easy-to-understand political comic books to influence how my friends vote (old example: https://masonmark.com/stuff/2008/America.pdf), and I even used it to create the CV which helped land me the awesome job I have now (http://www.fivespeed.com/mason/resume/mason_resume.pdf).
According to rumor, the principal guy behind OmniGraffle had a fairly unusual employment arrangement and wasn't typically seen that often in the halls of Omni — I don't know the details, or even his name, but as an OmniGraffle-dependent user I'm wondering with some trepidation if he was part of these layoffs.
I think one of the key challenges of this decade in the software industry is figuring out how the development and maintenance of high-quality software can be funded in sustainable ways. There is clearly a need for high-quality software that is not ad-supported, is not subscription-based, and does not monetize user data. However, the days of shrink-wrapped software and the shareware business model are over. If we want high-quality software, then we will need to come up with an answer to this problem.
Vendors get recurring money and aren't incentivized to make sweeping changes to have major releases to get more money for the same product; consumers can manage cash flow by only paying while they need it, there is a lower barrier to purchase, and vendors have more predictable income.
But yes, the cognitive load is a big one for me too.
I know it is an imperfect metaphor, but it helps get my point across that valuing ownership doesn’t make someone cheap. It makes them unwilling to lease software.
Were you paying for something like a Linux distribution? You can often do that on a subscription as well if you want to.
1) If it's for a piece of software I use on an ongoing basis the cost often rapidly eclipses what I'd have paid for standalone software, and it never stops rising.
2) There's usually some awkwardly contrived cloud tie-in, purely to enforce subscriptions, which breaks the software if your internet connection or the supplier's servers are down. This adds a completely unnecessary external dependency.
3) You're entirely at the vendor's mercy if they decide to change the software. At the very least, you're subjected to constant small breakages of your workflow, and at worst they change some major feature that you depend on and put you out of business for days or weeks until you find a workaround.
Edit: Also 4) The aforementioned awkward cloud tie-in often brings with it some gnarly privacy issues, with your sensitive files and private data being leeched off to the vendor's servers FoR YoUR ConVeNIeNcE.
The JetBrains model is good because I'm able to keep using a version without paying for upgrades (but I have kept up anyway as the annual fee is so cheap for what I get).
The points you've made are why I don't typically get software that is truly 'rental only' or hits your other points. That said, I've not run in to too many in the past few years that are affected by those issues any more. Are there some in particular you're thinking of that have those problems?
[1] It would probably be difficult contractually, but such things happen. See e.g. TextDrive hosting lifetime accounts.
Easy to support a couple hundred whoppers who pay big money on the coasts -- and who also have the time and money to really learn the tool. Expand that out to 100,000 customers with lower costs and greater support needs and it doesn't make sense.
High quality software has always required a recurring payment model. It's not viable to sell standalone versions to a new set of customers each year. In the past this was informal with upgrade versions every year. You could theoretically choose not to upgrade but software developers would have all kinds of tricks to "encourage you" such as not providing forwards compatible file formats.
What the subscription model does is align customers with the realities of software development. Yes the cost of software never stops rising but neither do the maintenance costs.
That depends. On macOS the churn is high. But there are probably a lot of Windows applications from the nineties that still run unmodified.
It's a good balance—if you spend extra time on worthwhile changes, the users need to pay for that time. The users can also decide to stick with what they have if they don't think your changes were worthwhile, which may be a perfectly reasonable path.
Look at Microsoft's behavior with O365. Many companies will be fully locked into Microsoft across voice, security and identity verticals based on tweaks to the O365/M365 licensing models. You need Azure AD to meet your email compliance requirements, but that's bundled with Intune, which in turn has a co-bundle with Defender ATP, etc.
First, because they have to compete with the likes of Office 365, which offers an Office Suite, 1TB cloud storage, and 60 Skype minutes (at least the used to) for little over 5 Euro per month. Subscriptions for more basic programs will look overpriced in comparison.
Second, as subscriptions become the new normal, we will see services like Apple Arcade. I think Apple Arcade will eventually eat up a lot of revenue as casual gamers will move from purchasing games to the 'all you can eat' Arcade. If Apple Arcade turns out to be successful, what holds them from launching 'App Arcade' [1]? Vendors that don't get into the App Arcade will lose a lot of revenue, vendors that do get into App Arcade will have a steady source of income, but will also be completely at the mercy of Apple (or Microsoft).
[1] I know there is SetApp, but anything that Apple launches has a lot more visibility. They also have more clout to get high profile applications in such a service.
If I pay for a book, I feel it cost some effort to produce it physically, print it, bind it, ship it. I cannot force myself to pay for an e-book, which is a pdf copied at no extra cost. Same for digital music and software or any other digital "good" or subscription. I sympathise with the creators, if they will produce something that does not scale, I will pay them for it. Otherwise, sorry, but not my job to figure out their business models.
They seem to have 'figured out' their business model already, and it involves each person copying the PDF, paying a nominal fee.
FWIW
I've argued elsewhere on HN, that the reward for building an automated system should be, pay for building the system. In America at least, we consider the entire lifetime output of said system to belong to the builder. That is unsustainable. Imagine a future where everything is automated. There will be no need for workers, and not much further development. The economy becomes a static owner-vs-unemployed deal, and how can that survive?
And even if some folks do decide to go the 'boutique' route and hand-make something, there is always another person who will go the automated route and cut their prices by 90%. Free market after all.
It will be upsetting for sure. Lots of entrenched interests in renting automation at high rates. Maybe have to do it in a phased approach - VAT or some such?
It’s absolutely immoral to me that you see a long chain of work (research, writing, editing, marketing, printing) and judge it solely on its last component (printing). There are so many physical goods where the final piece is just a small portion of the final cost.
Everything is an exercise in amortization. You seem happy to amortize the obvious parts (printing, binding, stocking, delivering), but not the behind the behind the scenes parts (writing, editing, marketing). That's a crappy distinction.
A lathe does what a lathe does every time. Even if the company goes out of business, there will be parts available for it for a while. No one at the lathe company can decide that it will stop performing feature X because it isn't popular or make enough money.
This leads into the second point. Companies (and individuals) have become fearful of external dependencies. So they push for FOSS so that they can avoid lock-in. Or they adopt an "invent here" mentality. Look at how many technology projects Google has cancelled despite the fact that they have infinite money.
As a user: I see some software I might be interested in trying. I have to go to generally some nameless, faceless group to get them to buy it. I open a ticket, or get an inquiry started, and they start asking boilerplate- do we have similar tools already, what is the license, etc. If we get past this phase, there is typically some kind of legal review. Maybe a few weeks later we can actually have this on our machine in some form.
From a company perspective: A user wants to buy yet another piece of software that we have to manage and keep track of. We will have yearly contract renewals to deal with most likely, understanding and holding them to their support model, ensuring they don't phone home, ensuring we are in compliance with our number of licenses, etc- this is all quite a bit of continued work. Also- how do we package this software and get it out to our users- there is a process for that as well.
With FOSS, we have none of these problems aside from the potential phone home problem, which isn't really a problem, because we restrict by default. It's just a much more pain-free process.
I also wonder if being MacOS/iOS only has hurt them, in the long run, more than they'd like to admit?
I also payed for multiple version on iPad.
However at about the point that they released their own sync service, they just let it stagnate.
There are so many ways the iOS and MacVersions could be more modern and more useful on a day to day level, none of which require a massive re-engineering effort.
My conclusion is that they have just fallen behind the times.
I think the word you are looking for is "greed".
If anyone who worked on that project is reading this, thank you.
[0]: https://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-...
- Lack of macOS staffing meaning that it's very much in maintenance mode (it was "make sandboxing work" in 2013 and "make dark mode work" recently), which parallels general pushes from Apple on iOS and iPadOS.
- Lack of need for new features: I think Omni could have pivoted towards Sketch/Figma style "export to mobile" (which would have actually probably meshed really well with the rest of the mobile app dev business, since we did mocks in OmniGraffle), but I'm curious what else Graffle really needs to be useful. I think historically there has been enough net new customers to not need to provide all that much upgrade incentive.
- In 2013 the codebase was a beast, and this was like v4 or v5... I can only imagine adding major new features to it.
I agree that the basics are excellent (alignment, copy & paste, sizing, ...) and still best in class.
Think Figma took them completely by surprise, Sketch's success was built on the user experience of a cocoa app feeling much more solid and slick than antiquated Adobe software, don't think they ever expected webtech to be able to compete but obviously with the force behind it and OS X being stagnant, it did.
Honestly starting to feel like the past 4 years of OS X changes have just been too much burden for the few remaining OS X software developers across the board. I recall when the Mac App Store came about a lot of developers moved their software to it, then sandboxing happened and that seemed like an absolute nightmare for most to implement, then after months of that they started to leave the App Store and then there's Gatekeeper too.
Now I'm not saying these are bad things, I definitely see the benefits but there just isn't the mass of engineering talent or money in building OS X software to justify the work required.
This has been tangible to me, 6 years ago my Mac was running all Cocoa apps apart from Creative Suite. Today all the apps I'm running are Electron apart from Textmate and Creative Suite.
The neglect of the Mac platform and the divvying up of the small Mac userbase into Mac users, iPad users and iPhone users means the future of the OS X app experience is just going to be running Javascript apps in Chrome wrappers.
Their other stuff on iOS, such as OmniFocus, OmniOutliner and OmniPlan has been nothing but fantastic.
OmniGraffle is great, and probably the best diagramming tool I've used, however it feels like it hasn't had a really significant update in a very long time and it's starting to show frankly
I was a die-hard OF1 user, but they've completely lost me with the OF2 redesign. Large checkboxes on the right stress me out on mobile (that's where my scrolling finger rests), and it took months before there were layouts in OF2 for Mac that had the same information density as in OF1. I haven't even tried OF3.
I’m not even sure which one OmniFocus is trying to be.
that said, even with stupid round checkboxes of2 runs my life, which would be much more chaotic without it.
They’re not the only ones. 1Password was also nearly perfect, and then instead of fixing the couple of minor flaws/limitations, they took it in a completely different direction.
I don’t have a great solution to this, but they certainly make me hesitant to pay for (proprietary) software. I now assume that whatever state the application is in now is the best it’s ever going to be.
I eventually quit using all the Omni tools for the same reasons -- OO was PERFECT and now is a mess, OF got a terrible redesign, etc.
I've been happily using Omnifocus for a long time;
- Single purchase, no subscription
- e2e encrypted syncing between devices (+ server storage)
- 0 tracking, ads etc.
Development and support is never ending.
Single purchase, you also get "single development", and then it dies.
At some point the market is not infinite.
This is a lie perpetuated by the saas industry. If you compare saas companies shutting down “services” to prior product companies stopping updating versions you don’t see much difference.
Also, sw engineers used to care about designing something well. So when you used something the first time it was occasionally delightful. Now it’s just “launch and we’ll worry about that in our next sprint”.
But the world is ever changing. Let say you build a UI for database. In a few years, a new version of mysql or postgresql will be released, and you have to update your software as well to use the new features.
What I'm saying is that almost whatever you are building, the development will never be done.
With subscriptions however, this all becomes hidden/vague. You're always paying, but it's no longer transparent what exactly it is you're paying for. Which is obviously very bad for the user.
(Of course it's a an entirely different story for services like Netflix, AppleTv+, Spotify, etc.)
I am firmly in the second group, but get why so many people prefer the first. I like that those users can get all of the updates they want, while I don't have to constantly burn mental energy figuring out UI changes and new bugs.
Tons of businesses uses commercial software with little need of support in form of some patches. Usually toolsuites are mature and they don't try to hack every last bit of it.
Now let say you make photoshop, it's great, people loves it. And most of your customers got it for a fixed price, and they are happy with it.
Now, You want to improve the software and add features that some professionals need.
But most of your customers are happy with previous version. you no longer have a lot of money coming in.
Repeat that a couple times, and now most of your market is happy, and you don't have any money coming in.
And then you close shop. And people wonder why.
Notion, Figma and Whimsical are eating their lunch. They have a far less robust feature base, but they’re fast, built for teams, simple to use and the pricing scales well.
On the other hand, Omni is almost entirely native apps, bloated feature sets and pricing that spent make sense in a team environment.
I’d love to see them rethink a few core apps with a fresh coat of paint and a better pricing scheme, developing web first. It’s definitely not too late.
The only native app I use anymore is a digital audio workstation. Deny it all you like but the trend is unmistakable. Even Sketch has been sidelined by Figma where I work now.
For some apps collaboration or centralized control are important and those lend themselves well to web technologies. For others (like the Omni apps), said collaboration and getting mediocre cross platform for free are not as important.
As someone who depends very heavily on OmniFocus, this would be an absolute wreck for me. I depend on my todo lists being available to me offline, and the idea of having to deal with the clunkiness of even a modern, high quality web app for something I use so fast and so regularly is horrid. And, yes, I find VSCode clunky compared to a real native app.
Moving to the web would be a downgrade for most of their products. Maybe OmniPlan could be some on premise SaaS, but otherwise it doesn't make sense.
I don't want my data in the cloud, I don't want perpetual subscriptions even if my usage dwindles. I don't want big price increases when the provider is bought out and I'm locked in. I want a rich interface which matches the platform. I want decent performance. I want to work offline. I don't want third parties to have access to and sell my data.
Of course the market for high-quality Apple only software is small. But I think they would be even less competitive and successful if they pivoted to the Web.
It would be almost like suggesting Microsoft drop their desktop Office applications and just focus on Office365.
There ARE some options that are text-based, I think. And if you really want and are nerdy enough, you can do it in OrgMode. But I dunno what nice polished native apps exist for Windows.
Not sure if you’re experience is different, but this seems to be exactly what they’re doing. Outlook windows app is buggy and terrible. Outlook 365 is great.
Excel is the only app better on native then web.
Sure maybe Web is clunky. But I find that being able to access applications from anywhere just trumps that concern.
I moved from Bear to Notion and Sketch to Figma for that reason.
UPDATE: Whimsical mentions being profitable as of May last year https://whimsical.com/blog/on-the-path-to-sustainability I’m definitely still curious about the other two.
A web app would be clunky and use 2GB RAM
Probably exactly what brought them to this point.
The type of person who is willing to pay extra for the polish Mac/iOS has over Windows/Android, is usually also the type of who is going to be willing to spend more for a better app.
But if it wasn’t a native Mac Cocoa app, I would never use it. A lot of OmniGraffle’s value comes from UI that abides by platform guidelines and the high-quality rendering and integrations enabled by being a native app rather than a lowest common denominator cross-platform port.
Omni in particular makes extremely clean, friendly applications that feel aligned with the platform.
Even if it were great, the fact I can't use it on my company workstation? Useless. Or even if I happened to have a mac workstation - being unable to share the source files with colleagues? It's dead on arrival. So basically it's a great diagramming tool so long as you work at a company that exclusively uses Macs. Which there really aren't many of. It's basically a diagramming tool for employees of Apple. Who, by the way, produce their own similar (less good) tools.
The productivity tools? Fine, you don't need to be able to share that. But Omnigraffle is juts a bizarre decision.
https://inessential.com/2020/03/31/looking_for_work
> The hard part of all this: normally everyone would get together for a happy hour for a few drops of encouragement and friendship. These rituals are nice, and they matter to me.
> But — (gesturing again at this fallen world) — nope.
I cannot afford the price tag. I wonder how many more people would buy it if it was just a little bit cheaper.
Or at least this was the wisdom imparted on me by a long time sales manager for a large VAR.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
While it's possible I'm an outlier, I can't help but wonder if a different pricing structure -- say, $49.99 for most Mac programs, $19.99 for most iOS ones, and a (gasp) subscription of $39.99 per year for upgrading to the Pro version that covered both iOS and Mac versions of the app -- would actually make them more money in the long run.
[1]: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html
I am a paying customer and I use it for my job... but if I'm doing anything at all I expect other people might need to edit, I can't use it. Because the other people won't have licenses, or won't have Macs.
So I use it for a lot of quick and dirty diagramming but don't really ever invest the time to take advantage of its power features, because anything that complex needs to be available for editing, even if it's less nice.
Just one example: In omnigraffle, pinch to zoom has all kinds of janky jumpiness that is simply disqualifying. And they only got it to this point very recently.
I like their products and Omnigraffle in particular, though they still seemed to have old-school high pricing.
I guess they have done their market research and concluded that lowering the prices does not add enough users. I like OmniGraffle a lot as well and recommend it to others. But I don't think anyone else has bought it on my recommendation. If you are the type of person (like me) who draws graphs maybe 10 or 20 times a year, the pricing is very steep, and people will just use something like draw.io.
I strongly dislike subscription pricing, but I think it might work in their case. They would be able to extract more money from existing customers + the barrier to entrance is lower for the occasional user.
I have tried to use the other Omni products, but the never really resonated with me. OmniFocus has quite a strict and focused GTD-driven model. I found it constraining and switched to Things. Though all these tools break down in a team setup, because they do not really support team sharing of tasks. OmniOutliner always felt too complex as a replacement for e.g. Markdown or org-mode and too limited to compete with the likes of notion.so.
As for pricing, they charge a fair price for their software given the audience (mostly professionals who are willing to pay a premium for high quality software). It's never been the cheapest, but it always had a large enough userbase to pay folks a good wage, have great perks, retain great talent, and enable incredible work/life balance.
Source: worked @ Omni in 2013
Most folks are highlighting what feel like obvious flaws in the business model:
- "They charge too much for their software"
- "'Apple only' meant limited distribution"
- "SaaS apps are making desktop software obsolete"
Those all may be true; however, I think these miss the point as they aim for something that wasn't really Omni's goal. Omni succeeds because it builds amazingly high quality software targeted at a specific group of users, and charges a fair price for it (vs the vast majority of software that is of questionable quality and heavily subsidized by VCs and/or your attention). There are (were?) still enough people in the world willing to buy high quality software at that price point to sustain the company.
I think the other point missed is that, unlike what I feel like a lot of SV memes portray, Omni was designed to be an infinite game, "A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play"[1]. The company isn't trying to blitzscale its way to a billion dollar valuation and let the founders cash out after five years--it's designed to be the best place for the best indie MacOS/iOS devs to have fun building great apps for as long as possible. They've succeeded for a long time, and I have no doubt that even with the downsizing there is still room for the company to succeed in that goal
If you're looking for awesome macOS/iOS devs, these really are the best of the best, and you'll be lucky to have them. Given that a big chunk of the team was also support and QA, there are likely a few of them available as well, and definitely check them out if you're in the market for those.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
Fun story: the first Omni app I ever shipped was OmniKeyMaster, which let you swap your Mac App Store license key for an Omni App Store license key. Within an hour of submission, Apple pulled it from the App Store (for obvious reasons). Always fun to have your hand slapped a week into an internship!
Second fun story: speaking to the nature of the company... as part of the internship offer, Omni agreed to pay for our housing, and ended up renting the five of us a house in Wallingford. Turns out the house ended up being a scam (we all showed up to move in and someone else was living in it), and so they put us up in the Residence Inn in South Lake Union for two weeks until they got us furnished apartments right next door to the office. It probably cost them a hell of a lot, but to them it was the right thing to do and they take care of their employees (even though they had just hired us). This company does its best to do right by its people, so I know this must have been an incredibly difficult decision for them to make.
We can lament how sad this news is - and it is - but it does expose that, at some level, the company was not able/willing to meet the needs of their (potential) customers.
It's just economics of the race to the bottom in software development, likely coupled with a touch of worldwide pandemic.
Their web version is a step in the right direction. But it took them ages to adapt to a faster development cycle, and the web version is still not usable for me.
I don't see it as a subscription vs. one-time pay problem. I am happy to pay for good software, but to be honest, OmniGroup still lives in the past.
When I visit their website now, and look at the screenshots they present, boy... I wouldn't buy these tools if I wouldn't know that they are actually so good.
The idea of hierarchical organization of knowledge is, to me, a really powerful one. I started using it when I was in law school, and it helped me stay organized as I was changing careers and learning how to write software. Even today, where my employer uses Jira and spreadsheets to stay organized, I use an outline as well, which despite being additional effort still provides a lot of value to me.
I've heard really good things about notion, and I may try it out one of the days. But for me, OO has been a particularly effective organizational tool in my arsenal.
I’m not sure Omni is as tied to quarterly planning/reporting; but for those who are, and are on the regular calendar schedule, this all happened just in time for a lot of the potential Q1 end of quarter sales to dry up as everyone tightened up.
OF for Mac is fine. Although I must admit - after using Things3 for a week or two - that OF feels like overkill, interface-wise.
Other Omni products feel like from distant past: OmniOutline (orgmode feels way lighter, better), OmniGraffle was super cool several years ago, but it hasn‘t evolved much.
I feel very sorry for this company because several years ago their products were so unique and typical for the Mac experience. Things have changed.
Omnifocus 2 was a joke in any category, while I have mixed fealing about 3 (speed, ergonomics, features).
Anyone want to chip in? :)
I don't use it, But I'm curious as to what are the major changes of v2 which disappoint you? I like the v1 interface as shown in the above mentioned article.
OG is probably the main reason I'm still on a mac. Nothing else comes close. I hope they can rethink their plans and create a more sustainable & successful business. Their other apps are pretty good too. Easily the best software shop for mac.
What would I be able to use it for in my daily life as a layperson doing layperson things?
When was that? 2002-2005 ish?
Been a customer since their web browser for NeXt. Dang.
Also, they need to embrace freemium model when it comes to project management like Bitrix24, Trello and Asana have done. That's why they are undisputed leaders right now.
Incredibly focused, well rounded products that are unmatched.
Omni's business model (small number of incredibly loyal customers paying top dollar for the software) likely wouldn't have survived on Android.
Mac sales aren't growing much but it's a stretch to say it's a failing platform.