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Omni Group Layoffs

mjtsai.com

51–60 of 257 posts

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#51
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it's best to stick to what you do well and do it really well. The market for their product is very different on the Windows side.

How was this for the best when they had to lay off "usually off market" talent?

It worked pretty well for three decades.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#53

I used to love Omni Graffle. But after spending a bit of time reading about their current product lineup, I can’t stop wondering why they didn’t transition to web apps years ago. 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 featu…

Agreed. The future of productivity apps is on the web. Pretty soon the only category of apps that will have to be native is heavy multi media apps like video editors and digital auto workstations.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#54

I thought the Omni group mostly worked remotely; it's too bad that they don't have the cash reserves to pay people to keep working at home, because it's a good time to crank out some code!! I like their products and Omnigraffle in particular, though they still seemed to have old-school high pricing.

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.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#55

I thought the Omni group mostly worked remotely; it's too bad that they don't have the cash reserves to pay people to keep working at home, because it's a good time to crank out some code!! I like their products and Omnigraffle in particular, though they still seemed to have old-school high pricing.

Unless things changed dramatically, Omni has no remote folks, it's entirely Seattle based.

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

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#56
post #14

I discovered Omni yesterday when League of Legends dumped 20 gB of text logs on my brother’s old MacBook, eating up all available disk space and crashing it. He asked me for help. I didn’t know what was taking up all his disk space so I searched for a tool to help me and found OmniDiskSweeper. Unlike the MacOS builtin tools that try to hide the underlying file system, OmniDiskSweeper actually helped me understand the…

IIRC, OmniDiskSweeper and OmniWeb are just things Ken and Tim (CEO and CTO) work on in their spare time, mostly because they enjoy hacking on that stuff. Not sure if they're on HN, but Ken (@kcase) will certainly respond if you tweet your thanks at him!

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#57

I used to love Omni Graffle. But after spending a bit of time reading about their current product lineup, I can’t stop wondering why they didn’t transition to web apps years ago. 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 featu…

> I can’t stop wondering why they didn’t transition to web apps years ago.

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.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#58
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying using mac components alone gives it the $50-$100 a pop value, if so thats some quality brainwashing going on.

I’ve been paying for OmniGraffle since 2004 or so and also bought licenses at various employers. The price has never been a problem. 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.

> a lowest common denominator cross-platform port

I think the word you were looking for was "Electron Cancer"

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#59
I'd spend a lot of money for an Android version of OmniOutliner (and OmniGraffle); 100 EUR/year would be no problem. Sad they bet on a failing platform.

Incredibly focused, well rounded products that are unmatched.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#60
post #28
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OmniWeb was my favorite browser when it was around.

Which was originally the web browser on NeXT computers.

The title of the web browser on NeXT, however, must go to TBL's WorldWideWeb, world's first.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

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