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Omni Group Layoffs

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Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#111

Post by alain_gilbert »

toss4732 wrote: post #110
alain_gilbert wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think subscription is that bad. 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.

I think companies should use something like what Jetbrains does with its IDEs. You get a lifetime access to the version you paid a year subscription for. Keep the yearly subscription up, and you are getting updates, getting a more recent lifetime access, and the sub gets cheaper.

I really like their model as well.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#112

Post by Klonoar »

emdowling wrote: post #91
asciimike wrote: post #63

Was 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…

I agree with all of the above, but unfortunately no matter how good the intention and clarity of market ("high quality software targeted at a specific group of users"), if that user group is not willing to pay, then you are doing a bad job of solving their problems. 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 (pot…

Uhhh, no - they're well known for meeting that need. They're also very well known for being good at what they do.

It's just economics of the race to the bottom in software development, likely coupled with a touch of worldwide pandemic.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#113

Post by linguae »

dman wrote: post #82

Nothing signals to me that the market for high quality software is utterly and completely broken than this piece of news. Sad to hear this - if the Omni folks are having difficulty what hope do other small shops have. I am always amazed at the creativity SW folks show when coming up with reasons/excuses for not paying for tools - the culture around this is very saddening. On the other hand my friends who are into ele…

This reminds me a lot of presentation slides that I read a few nights ago. I was reading presentation slides from Carnegie Mellon professor Heather Miller about the funding challenges that open source software projects have (https://2019.programming-conference.org/details/programming-...). So many people and companies rely on open source infrastructure and productivity tools, and while there are plenty of people contributing to open source software in the terms of donations and development, there are key open source projects that aren't getting the support they need despite the wide usage and importance of those projects.

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.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#114

Post by inapis »

matharmin wrote: post #97
e40 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took a meeting with a potential customer years ago. He was high on our technology and seemed certain to purchase. At our last lunch he told us their software company's CEO had a policy, they only used FOSS software. The irony of it hurt. Still does.

At my company I take a very different view depending on where in the stack the tech is used: 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…

This is what everyone’s approach should be. The product itself should be standing on the shoulders of FOSS giants. Everything else is just quality-of-life improvements and tools which should be paid for if they speed up your productivity or decrease your mental load.

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.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#115

Post by biztos »

devin wrote: post #92

I’m slightly confused. What about the current pandemic changed their business so much? Do people suddenly have less need for their apps? That seems unlikely. It seems like this has been coming for awhile. OmniGraffle missed the online diagramming collaboration wave, and OmniFocus missed the same thing on the project management side.

While I'm sad to hear they're suffering, I agree about OmniGraffle.

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.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#116

Post by rtpg »

chrisfrantz wrote: post #41

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…

It would be really really hard to get omnifocus to be as performant in web app form as a native app

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#117

Post by Jyaif »

rubidium wrote: post #105
alain_gilbert wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think subscription is that bad. 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.

“ Single purchase, you also get "single development", and then it dies.” 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…

I don't know about the other platforms, but I do know that on iOS if you have a non-trivial app you have to update it every year, otherwise things stop working. That's work!

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#118

Post by 7777fps »

linguae wrote: post #113
dman wrote: post #82

Nothing signals to me that the market for high quality software is utterly and completely broken than this piece of news. Sad to hear this - if the Omni folks are having difficulty what hope do other small shops have. I am always amazed at the creativity SW folks show when coming up with reasons/excuses for not paying for tools - the culture around this is very saddening. On the other hand my friends who are into ele…

This reminds me a lot of presentation slides that I read a few nights ago. I was reading presentation slides from Carnegie Mellon professor Heather Miller about the funding challenges that open source software projects have ( https://2019.programming-conference.org/details/programming-... ). So many people and companies rely on open source infrastructure and productivity tools, and while there are plenty of people co…

What's wrong with the subscription model?

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.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#119

Post by saiya-jin »

alain_gilbert wrote: post #104
DavideNL wrote: post #85

It's sad to see apps full of ads/tracking and ridiculous subscriptions thrive, while quality software like this gets into trouble. 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.

I don't think subscription is that bad. 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.

Often you don't need more than you have, and its nice to have fixed costs. An example - you buy Photoshop or Lightroom, and they cover 100% of your needs. As long as you can run it, you are happy with what they provide. Well apparently that didn't generate enough cash for Adobe but that's a long story.

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.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#120

Post by joeberon »

Unfortunately Omni's software is pretty old and bloated at this point, although I've only used OmniFocus and OmniGraffle. The former is very powerful but this is a blessing and a curse, in that the UX is very cluttered and quite intimidating. I honestly think that Things has exceeded it now, being less customisable but also capturing the essence of what makes OmniFocus good without getting bogged down in too much customisation and verbosity. OmniFocus is the opposite of a productivity tool to me, it keeps you in the app for too long configuring and setting things up just right, instead of getting out of the way

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

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