More on OneNote and OPML

If you’re willing to install the preview service pack for OneNote, you can do this now. I’ve been running the preview SP1 for a week or so now with no problems, so I’ll be pusihing this higher on the priority list.

Say what you will about Winer, but from this user’s perspective he shows deep wisdom on the long term competitive value of supporting a small number of formats that are simple and that work. It’s so easy to fall into the lazy trap of trying to build your strategy on creating proprietary formats and trying to “lock in” your customers. If you want to understand why that’s a dumb idea, track down and watch the recent Michael Porter interview on Charlie Rose. Then think about what Porter is saying.

A picture named opml.gifWow, this is cool. The next release of Microsoft’s OneNote will import OPML outlines. Very good. Of course it should export them too. The old Microsoft would never have done this, in fact there’s an old Microsoft guy running around the syndication community, he’s one of the biggest advocates of reinventing everything just for the sake of revinvention. It takes a lot for a big company like Microsoft to adopt a format developed outside, esp one not developed at another BigCo. Thanks for setting a great example. Google, please pay attention to this. You lose nothing by keeping the number of formats small, by building on other people’s work instead of undermining it, by not being evil. You already knew that, at the top, but perhaps some of the new guys don’t understand what it means. It’s in the company prospectus. So I hope you won’t mind if we hold you to a higher standard. I assume that’s why it’s there. [Scripting News]