OneNote Momentum

What an exciting three months OneNote 2007 has had out in the marketplace. By every measure OneNote 2007 is a hit! Check out this blog activity for one thing:

Blog posts containing "OneNote" over the last 360 days taken May 9 (from Technorati)

Traditionally many people measure a product's success by a particular metric: the number of units sold. But there are many other metrics to use: of course one is "profit" - if you gave away all those units for a song (or for free!), you didn't make any money. Also its not clear how dedicated those customers are. Conversely if you held the price high enough and people bought a lot of it, you have a good sense that people see value in the product.

Another measure is usage. You want to see that people are really using your product. That means they are getting value out of it, and also indicates loyalty.

Another measure is "buzz" like the blog measure above. Are people talking about your product? If so, that's also a good sign. Notice there is a spike not just on the "news" of availability (around Jan 30) but there are higher spikes later - that's when people are using the product and talking about it. For examples of what people are saying, check out Dan's "blog roundup" posts: January, February, March, April. Some of my favorite quotes:

1. "OneNote 2007 sharing is indistinguishable from magic"

2. "I just purchased a copy of Microsoft OneNote, my life will never be the same."

But those are tame. Why not really go for it?

1. "The Greatest Invention in Human History? I vote for Microsoft OneNote"

2. "I need Office OneNote 2007 to live."

And for the you-know-who crowd:

1. "I can't believe I'm so excited over some program that M$ came up with. It's probably just all the adrenaline that's been pumping through me lately."

And we're just getting started!

There are other measures. For software there is also "deployment" - many companies have purchased long term contracts with Microsoft for most or all of our latest software, but they don't always get around to putting the new stuff on their users' machines since they have a lot of work to do. So we care about whether that has happened or not since it is a measure of how much they value the new stuff.

I can't share specific sales figures with you all and they don't tell the whole story anyway (there's that "deployment issue" plus lots of people get OneNote on their laptop but don't know it, and so on). I do want to show the existing trends we're seeing however.

First, it's worth noting that OneNote 2003 (the first release) was a success in its own right. A new product that costs money and isn't a visible lifestyle item (e.g. software to get work done vs. an iPod) takes time to build its user base. And as I said, the nice thing about free products or services is that they can build users fast, but because they are free their users often have no special investment in the service. OneNote 2003 shipped well over 10million units and racked up several million actual users over the 3 years it was on the market (as best we can tell). Pretty good for a whole new "category" of software most people didn't know about or know they needed, with next to no marketing budget and not being included in any Office Suite! By contrast, the top web productivity apps and suites that everyone writes about because they're "hot" all have less than 500K users, most of them far less (I can't tell you how we know that though!)

Our plans for OneNote are for it to build momentum like "rolling thunder" over several years. Each release retains users from the one before and adds proportionally more. The great majority of people only try a new thing when their friends recommend it, and that takes some time. If you think about how an application like PowerPoint went from obscurity to ubiquitous over the course of a few years - that's the idea.

Fortunately, in addition to raving fans and sales figures, we are able to get more quantitative and explicit measurements on popularity. One way is through the Customer Experience Improvement Program. Some of you may know this - it is the little balloon that pops up to ask you if we can (anonymously and in aggregate) track which commands you use in the application, how long you use the application, etc.  We use this data to make the product better in the future, but it is also a handy measure of overall activity. CEIP data is returned to us in the form of "sessions" which are fixed length blocks of time containing data.

Here's where it really gets exciting. Although we can't know for sure how many users these session counts represent, we think variables like what % of the users have signed up for the program are about the same for each release, which makes them comparable. Look at these relative numbers!

Release	Date	Number of CEIP sessions added overthe 5 months after RTM (code final)
2003	8/15/2003	310,109
2003 SP1	7/22/2004	1,050,620
2007	10/28/2006	10,744,083

Do you need a chart? Can someone say hockey stick?

How many users is this? It's really hard to say since it depends on people agreeing to join the program which is off by default. Only a tiny fraction actually send us data. But it's a lot, and look at that trend!

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 10, 2007
  I won't go as far as some of the people Chris Pratley mentions , but I am definitely turning into a OneNote

• Anonymous
  May 10, 2007
  Great to see another post Chris. I've been with OneNote since the first beta and it has definitely impacted more on my productivity and organisation than any other program. Everyone I show it to gets the "Wow", many of them asking where they can buy it from etc. I am surprised though how many of these people who immediately can see how OneNote would benefit them have never even heard of it before. It looks like the marketing department is not getting the message across, however if my word of mouth experiences are anything to go by then you should see some exponential growth as the word spreads.

• Anonymous
  May 11, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 11, 2007
  Chris, what happened to your spell checker?

• Anonymous
  May 11, 2007
  No spell checker in the blog comment tool. And I am a bad typist (I rely on autocorrect - that's why I write my blog posts in OneNote.)

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2007
  Can I sync OneNote data between my Tablets?

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2007
  Erin - yes. You have a number of choices of how to do this. The easiest is to treat the notebooks on one tablet as the "master copy". Make a file share out of the "OneNote Notebooks" folder. From the second machine, use File/Open>Notebook to open the individual notebooks on the "master" machine. Done. More details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2006/06/07/syncing-onenote-2007-notes-across-your-many-pcs.aspx

• Anonymous
  May 15, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 19, 2007
  Where are the Onenote 2007 books? I cannot even find a sniff of any in the pipeline. I would have thought it would warrant a book or two, seeing how popular a product it is, and how much is in it.

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2007
  Chris, You make some very good points regarding the possible reasons why there are no books. The help is very good, and the software is simple and intuitive. Also, one of the good points about Onenote is how it integrates into Office 2007, maybe there are some Office 2007 books out there that have decent coverage of Onenote? I like online help, blogs etc, but I like to read things in hard copy, to the point that I often print out web articles and long blog entries... What I would like to see is a Onenote 2007 book that is heavy on case studies - with lots of user scenarios. Covering different types of users and how they would use Onenote - from software developers to graphic artists to business men to students, and non-tech people. I guess such a book would be as much about productivity and managing information as it would be about Onenote. Would anybody else be interesting in something like this?

• Anonymous
  May 23, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 23, 2007
  Lea, what's the other product? A couple of apps (Open Office Writer is one) have a bug pasting from the clipboard that manifests when OneNote has placed data on the clipboard (correctly). They know about it and I expect it will get fixed someday. If you tell me the application we can investigate the cause. Although the clipboard seems like a simple thing there is actually a complex negotiation that goes on under the covers and each new app combo risks exposing a bug.

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2007
  Hi Chris, Hooked on OneNote.  Almost kept me from switching to Mac.  I run it in Parallels.  It hurts and I may switch back.   I'm CEO of a robotics company and want to put all our corporate info in front of the employees.  I've got some Wiki proponents who are pushing that solution.  It is a little pricey for all employees to have a seat of the ON 2007.  Will there be viewer that I can buy for the non-managers? Thanks! Mel

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2007
  Lea: thanks for the name of the app. We will take a look. FWIW, the reason the clipboard can work with every app you've tried but not a new one (i.e. OneNote) is that there are many ways to place things on the clipboard, and many combinations of what formats you can publish. What OneNote does is perfectly legal and not odd in any way, but instant text might not be expecting it. Especially if they are trying to grab text from the application rather than using OneNote to make the copy to clipboard.  Some apps have only been tested with a few existing apps. So you get odd problems where an app might not choose text when a picture is available, or assumes RTF is preferable when HTML is available, but didn't take into account that not every app produces both. In any case, its just another example of why you have to test software... Mel: you can give everyone the free trial, which acts as a viewer after the trial expires. See this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2006/12/06/onenote-viewer.aspx

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2007
  Hi Chris Thanks for the info.  I hope you didn't think I was suggesting that ON was doing something wrong - it was just interesting, from my point of view, that it was "different".  I think IT took it that way too and they certainly were able to come up with their "fix" (for want of a better, less suggestive, term) really quickly.  I love my ON and can't do without it and they (IT) were happy to accommodate tweaking their product. Thanks again.  All the best. Lea

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2007
  Lea, no problem. The rule in software is that it is your problem until you prove it is the other guy's. That's why we wanted to know what app you were having trouble with so we could look into it - and if you want to point them my way to let us know what they are doing to work around that would be great. Sometimes people don't understand why something as "simple" as the clipboard might not work, so I thought I'd add some explanation. The clipboard is actually an example of something fairly complex that computer designers have done well to make look simple. It's really surprisingly more involved than you'd think given how easy it is to operate. Yay! One success, now on to the other 1000 bedevilling complexities...

• Anonymous
  June 04, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2007
  I'm a new GTD devotee, using the Treo 700P. Many GTD followers recommend OneNote. Is there any plans or any way to sync OneNote to a palm device? Thanks for any help you can give me.

• Anonymous
  July 15, 2007
  I wish to emphasis a need for a OneNote book (as mentioned in an earlier post).  I'm a user that has worked with OneNote, but has yet to get hooked on it.  I really haven't put any data into it since I've upgraded to OneNote 2007. It seems like a wonderful idea, but... When I get so stuck, but think there is value I am just missing, that is where the book can help.  Then, once the product becomes part of my life, the book becomes a technical reference. Yes, Virginia, we do need at least one solid OneNote book...

• Anonymous
  July 26, 2007
  What you need is a OneNote Viewer, or at least a decent export to XPS. And when I say decent, I mean at least 2 things: (1) A full table of contents and (2) don't repeat images when they are cut off. Please finish this product before adding 1,000,000 other features that only 6 people will ever use.

• Anonymous
  July 29, 2007
  Relieved to see the comments regarding the NEED for a good OneNote 2007 book. Thought I  had lost my researching prowess, as I found nadda. Heck, if distributors don't want to risk the outlay for hard copy, there's always the ebook format. C'mon folks, some of us ON2007 devotees are getting kinda desperate. While there are resources out there, I've grown weary of always having to run searches to get the answer to a question which would likely be covered in a text devoted to the subject (sigh).

• Anonymous
  August 01, 2007
  Any plans to include OneNote in the Mac version of MS Office 2008?

• Anonymous
  August 02, 2007
  I use CircusPonies Notebook on the Mac platform at home and love it, does anyone here know how OneNote compares?  OneNote seems to be similar in function and I really need something like this for the peecee world at work.