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Omni Group Layoffs

mjtsai.com

211–220 of 257 posts

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#211
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 is very sad. But I used to buy all the Omnigroup software until a couple of years ago, the prices went up a lot and I stopped.

This story is more Omni slipping rather than the model failing universally.

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.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#212
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…

There isn't enough wealth to go around for every adult to have a $50+K/yr income. The developed world economy only works if most people are paid very little but woke anyway.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#214
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…

I agree with your general point. We don't value time savings enough. However, I'd offer a few observations. 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 ind…

Google doesn't have infinity software. They have X engineers and hiring more adds more complexity and doesn't lead to more useful software.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very sad. But I used to buy all the Omnigroup software until a couple of years ago, the prices went up a lot and I stopped.

Wow really? I remember looking at their prices 5–10 years ago and thinking they seemed a bit inflated.

20 years ago.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#216
post #44
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…

dust (du + rust) [1] makes for a good oss alternative. [1] https://github.com/bootandy/dust

Not in the same league UI wise

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#217

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 cus…

The flip side of it is that OmniFocus needs to be so customizable because the defaults are not great. (I feel the same about the default styles in OmniGraffle.) 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 info…

I had the same experience with OF2, but honestly think it wasn't entirely their fault as ios 7 sort of pulled the rug out from under the world.

that said, even with stupid round checkboxes of2 runs my life, which would be much more chaotic without it.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#218

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 cus…

It doesn't take 30 years to write a diagramming app. It's basically done. They should really slash the prices and profit from the margin. Well, they should have before the web destroyed the low end market.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#219

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 like the fact that they make and sell things. They don't insinuate themselves into your life and force everything into the cloud and their website.

Re: Omni Group Layoffs

#220
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ov…

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