OneNote is also showing up on devices (tap the Surface Pro 3‘s pen to fire up the app) and in other software (think Project Spartan, the new Windows 10 browser). Recent examples include Touch ID support on iOS and Android Wear support. This is a no-brainer: Each platform offers unique opportunities. Going forward, a lot of the incoming features will also be platform-specific. As Megiddo put it, the ultimate goal is to “compete with paper” and “still be able to differentiate.” Microsoft sees this as proof that the reminders problem still isn’t solved yet.Īt a higher level, the OneNote team wants to simply continue to reduce friction. Megiddo pointed out that many users still email or SMS themselves so they don’t forget something. Lastly, reminders need to improve and work with where you are (walk into a meeting or classroom, and the corresponding OneNote notebook will open automatically). OCR support will be expanded to support handwriting, as opposed to just typed text, so you can search for content that you or someone else wrote on paper, a whiteboard, a chalkboard, someone’s forehead, etc. Recall refers to being able to find what you’ve saved when you need it. For example, OneNote can already recognize recipes, then tag and automatically format them, but that feature needs to, and will, be, expanded to more types of content, Megiddo said. There is a lot of automation possible here, with analysis of text and automatic grouping. Being able to shape how your content is formatted and add to it after the capture ensures it is accessible and searchable. Organize and enrich are tied together, and are of course necessary for the final step. Going forward, Microsoft wants to bring ink support to all platforms, boost image interpretation, and advance meeting recordings. Whether it’s quickly jotting down a thought or snapping a picture of some scribbles, it should be transferable to OneNote as quickly as possible. Megiddo explains that his team is developing OneNote with four pillars in mind: capture, organize, enrich, and recall.Ĭapture refers to taking that initial note. The second, arguably much bigger, use case is capturing and recalling anything a user wants to remember, i.e., storing quick notes for later. The first use case has always been note-taking on a desktop or laptop, “long-form note-taking” and “visual notebook scenario” as Megiddo put it. Now, like the rest of Microsoft, the OneNote team is all about cross-platform, mobile, and the cloud. For the better part of a decade, OneNote was only for Windows users. The other factor pushing OneNote growth is, naturally, mobile. Google has yet to share user numbers for its own Google Keep solution. Note that the company isn’t simply talking about installations: These are active users, so all those enterprise customers that get OneNote preinstalled on their computers along with Microsoft Office but don’t ever use it? They aren’t being counted.įor scale, OneNote’s chief competitor Evernote had 100 million users in May 2014, though it didn’t share how many of those are actively using the service. While year-over-year growth can be a tricky metric (Microsoft refused to provide exact numbers), it’s still quite an achievement for a service that has been around for 12 years. While going free naturally helped, it wasn’t the only factor: He says OneNote is on track to double the number of active users again in 2015. Megiddo noted that the team saw a “big elbow in the graph” after making OneNote free. In fact, Megiddo told VentureBeat that OneNote doubled its monthly active users in 2014. The big turning point for OneNote arguably came in March 2014, when Microsoft launched OneNote for Mac as a free release and began offering a freemium version of OneNote for Windows (it went completely free just last week). The feature was moved today from the Windows app to the cloud, and suddenly, all platforms can leverage it. Today’s release is a perfect example: Previously, OCR support was only available in OneNote for Windows.
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