Just purchased 5.0

[schferk]

It's just a day later, and another partial contender is stripped to its bones. Surfulater-Desktop biting the dusk, that's not news, in fact the developer told people so some 10 months ago. (I did never buy the prog since I can't stand its colors, make me vomit.) An outliner contributor having put some stuff into that prog now links to the developer's site where latter says, in particular,

"I’ve tried to extract the essence of what is in Surfulater and simplify it as much as possible without sacrificing functionality."

Well, I was too tired yesterday to add that detail I invariably saw in desktop-to-cloud portations, Evernote being the best example of this phenomenon: As soon as a serious prog is put into the cloud, not only for the very first months it's stripped to its bare bones, as I said above, but the developers really think that will be like that forever, and good enough for the dumb cattle from which they finally charge a monthly fee (paid in advance in yearly installments, of course).

That monthly charging was not the case before since people didn't accept with desktop sw; now with cloud applics, they happily pay. If this makes you remember the content charging trick for slates when nobody paid for that very same content downloaded from the web into normal pc screens, you're right, so the shift is triple:

Make people pay for content, and make them pay, each month anew, for apps that have been stripped to the core, and that will never get some flesh on their bones anytime, since those developers pretend the cloud crowd is too dumb for giving'em some sophistication.

So, Neville Chamberlain's (or something's) "I’ve tried to extract the essence of what is in Surfulater and simplify it as much as possible without sacrificing functionality." is basically a lie or let's call it wishful thinking, and indeed,

Surfulater-desktop had a tree, with clones, and even tags, lately, whilst Surfulater-cloud will have a tag tree: gone will be the real tree, together with its tags - that must be very funny for people who got dozens of thousands of items in Surfulater-desktop, let alone the clones (you remember me saying here, some 8months ago, that UR's clone feature is perhaps its best detail, but that I didn't use clones, for fear of probs when putting my stuff elsewhere?).

Anyway, I see a big shift, from real applications to "simili"-sw, that "does" something for the user, but that does NOT really help the user to do real good work, so it's a paradigm shift from software-as-tool-for-smart-people to software-as-service-to-consumers.

We owe this in great part to the man I jokingly call "that corpse from Cupertino" - for another saying, refer above ("the cloud crowd"), but the tragedy is that everybody else swears he was right in anything, and especially, low-brow, MS now:

They also try to take 50 p.c. of developers' revenu from their "marketing" gate, and they also want to defer any applic they don't like (e.g. because they have a contract with a bigger contender that offers a minor competiting app but that will get Apple there, MS here much more money yet) from gaining access to the market, so developers are, and more and more will be, at the mercy of the "heirs" - top managers - of "God" there, Dollarbill here.

This being said, the primitive approach of developers to the cloud crowd is a very big chance to any traditional sw's developers since in making available real excellence, sophisticated details, complete functionality, they won't simply not surpassed by those cloud amateurs. (I said it here in the past, look what Evernote's developers do with all their mult-million dollar revenus: They have certainly a good life, but reinvestment into much better than so basic sw: njet.)

There is very well big real estate on the marketplace for traditional offerings... but only if they see their strength, and build up on it... not by giving the battle up and doing the strict minimum only in order to satisfy their customers.

P.S.: Gods don't die, do they?

[tfjern]

Schferk, please keep it brief, or at least briefer.

[Roaster]

I'm still holding back my order for V5 as the changes from V4.2b to V5 are not worth upgrading, unfortunately.
I'm not planning at all to install Windows 8 so far and will wait for Windows 9 which will hopefully revert the UI changes made in Win 8.

I don't understand the version numbering either as there is IMO nothing big which would justify this jump.

Just my 2ct, btw.
Michael

[tim]

schferk, 1 vote for keeping it long! You make valid points and worth the read.

Re: legacy hardware, wouldn't it be good if someone, somewhere created an open PC platform that could run old OSes and apps. There's always Linux, but why does it have to be sooo hard.

[igoldsmid]

I have to now say, that given all the threads on the new Version 5.0 with many expressing disappointment with what seemed to be a promise broken by the developer relative to the Product Roadmap - and the fact the the developer hasn't spoken up at all about any of this - having purchased an upgrade in trust and without question, I am now feeling quite betrayed. Not good.

[dasymington]

Yes, I too am regretting paying for the upgrade as a gesture of loyalty to the product and to support future development.