10 March 2009
A long, long time ago I read Guy Kawasaki's book The Macintosh Way. It was a decent read, if I remember correctly, but the one item that really stuck with me was an experiment that he did. In an attempt to see how large companies handled potential "evangelists" (people excited about their products), he called a dozen or so companies and said to them, "I like your product. How can I help sell it?" Some companies, like Harley Davidson and Macintosh, were all over it: they had user groups or fan clubs and knew exactly how to get people in touch with others who wanted to spread the word. Other companies (IBM, I think, and Microsoft to be sure) were simply flummoxed by the proposition. This is what came to mind last night as I was trying to figure out how to extend Microsoft OneNote so as to better meet my needs. Sara & I are working on organizing our lives (using Take Back Your Life and Getting Things Done), and as part of that we're trying to figure out what tools will best work for our new organizational structures. Outlook is fine as far as it goes, but I really like OneNote. It's almost, almost exactly what I need. So I figured, hey, I'm a developer. And I know that Microsoft has a OneNote API. I'll just create a little plug-in that completes OneNote for me. And what the heck, I might as well offer it to others, just to show them how useful OneNote can be. Except it's not that easy. It turns out that what you need to write Office plug-ins (and therefore OneNote plug-ins) is something called Visual Studio Tools for Office. So that's cool. I use Visual Studio 2008. Except I use the Standard Edition, and VSTO doesn't come with the Standard Edition. So fine, it's probably worth it to me & I can expense it: I'll just purchase and/or download VSTO as a standalone item. Except it's not available as a standalone. The upshot is: Here I am, someone who wants to enhance the functionality of a Microsoft product and offer it out to the world with the express intention of making OneNote more useful, someone who's willing to do this for free, someone who's willing to spend several hours one night just to figure out how to get started and I can't do it. I have official, paid-for copies of Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2008, and I'd like to use them together. But I get not only no help but actual obstacles thrown in my path from Microsoft. Alright, so I finally figured out how to make it work, even without VSTO. So I'll proceed. My next post will follow up the complaining with an actual solution. But dang: How stupid is that?
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