OUTLINERS
OUTLINERS
Sent: 11/23/96; 6:38:36 PM
From: stauffer@usa.net (Mike Stauffer)
a category -- that it would be swallowed up by word processors.>
Forget the "It's not a category" stuff. I can't speak to the demand, but I know there is a need for outliners. More need than people even know they have. The market needs to be educated.
I used More on the Mac since it was ThinkTank. I used it to manage my daily activities as a systems analyst. I used it to design a replacement for our company's flagship product, a data management system for IBM's AS/400. I used it to put together over 200 pages of pseudo-code for the system. That system could not have been designed without More. (It's not More's fault that the product was canned 2/3 of the way to completion. Something about green screens not being the wave of the future. Oh, well).
Now I'm using NetManage's ECCO under Win/95, which is a PIM with a fairly decent outliner. It is lacking some features which More has. Cloning is a big one, especially missed when the outline represents a program and the sub-headings are procedures. Hoisting is another. Lots of sleek fkey equivalents is another. ECCO has some neat stuff More doesn't have. A concept of doing an Alice-In-Wonderland descent down into and through a column or a column value, and discovering that you are in an alternative view of your items based on that column or that value.
What surprises me the most is that the systems analysts and developers for the client/server project that I joined next do not use outliners. "What's that? Why would I need it?" And this in the context of out-sourcing actual coding to another continent, with pseudo-coded requirements going out over the internet and PowerBuilder DLLs coming back. My questioners are the architects, writing the pseudo-code and turning around bug-lists.
At our company, the managers use the outliner. The techies are a whole market which doesn't yet know it needs the outliner, and needs it a lot worse than the managers. Our world is a complex one. The real world, but even more so the information technology world. Suppressing the detail yet being able to recall it at will from my outliner memory augmentation device is all that keeps me afloat in the overwhelming rush of information, and of demands on my time and attention.
Tell you what, I'll forgive you the sale of More to Symantec if you'll combine the best of More and ECCO and bring the result to market. Just make it available to both the Mac and Win/95 worlds. Please.
-Mike Stauffer MDVStauffer@CMDS.com
P.S. MS Word's outliner can't hold a candle to either More or ECCO. One is a toy, the other two are industrial strength. If the outliners have been swallowed up by the word processors, it may have been because the outliners were trying too hard to be word processors or presentation tools, rather than information management tools. Narrow the focus, sell the focus, and educate the market on the focus.
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