I would love to hear more how the COVID19 has exacerbated the business down period. I naively thought that enterprise software would not see a strong impact from COVID19 in the first 2-3 months.
Omni Group Layoffs
61–70 of 257 posts
Re: Omni Group Layoffs
#62I think Omni Group's locked down to Apple is a mistake. As a iPad Pro/iPhone user I wish to buy their products but as a Windows/Linux desktop user the lack of cross-platform support is a huge dealbreaker.
It's also what made the company: they were originally developers of software targeting NeXT machines/OS. Their products are a better fit in the role of 'big fish in a small pond' of the NeXT and then Mac worlds. Also, the Windows world has never valued the kind of craftsmanship Omni puts into their products... it's much more of a corporate market where managers and purchasing departments decide which products win.
True, but sometimes what got you here, won't get you there.
Re: Omni Group Layoffs
#63Was one of the first interns @ Omni back in 2013. I'm really sad to hear this, and I have only good things to say about Ken, Tim, and the whole Omni team.
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.
Re: Omni Group Layoffs
#64I 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've used omnigraffle on and off for 15 years. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about the UI seems to shout "Mac OS" (or maybe more accurately Cocoa).
Re: Omni Group Layoffs
#65I'm sorry to hear this. In a subscription model world, Omni stand out in producing very high quality one time purchase software. I love OmniGraffle! Such a great product once you learn it.
They seem to be moving to a subscription model: https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/buy/
Re: Omni Group Layoffs
#66I 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…
Web apps have always been inferior to mobile or desktop apps. Sluggish, less featured and dependent on the network at least part of the time.
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.
Re: Omni Group Layoffs
#67I 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.
That was supposed to happen any moment now for the past 10+ years. The reason it didn't is because web apps are clunky and less dependable.
Re: Omni Group Layoffs
#68I 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 won't use web apps unless there is no other choice.
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.
Re: Omni Group Layoffs
#69I have been an OmniGraffle user from the very beginning (~2000). I love OmniGraffle. But I've seen Sketch come (and go) and there have been no significant updates for OmniGraffle for a very very long time. Omni only added to their iOS offerings and totally forgot about desktop. I understand that mobile "is the future" but, there is a significant need for desktop design applications. And although I still use OmniGraff…
I have a few theories on this:
- 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.
Re: Omni Group Layoffs
#70I 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…
My take is that their core expertise is in the Apple ecosystem (from the earliest days), and a pivot to web would require major hiring efforts (effectively fire most of the people and hire a bunch of web devs). That's not really the company culture as I knew it, and I think that most folks are probably happy to ride this one into the sunset than try to rebuild the entire business.