Notion is So Sticky It’s Hard to Walk Away (Premium)

This has come up a lot lately, but I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to replace the personal technology hardware, software, and services that I rely on by testing alternatives. This has long been true, and you've surely heard the story of me downloading Slackware Linux disk images using the (then) high-speed connection at Scottsdale Community College in the mid-1990s and then painstakingly copying them onto physical media, one 3.5-inch floppy at a time.

But it's also accelerated in the past year, and especially in the past 6 months, thanks to enshittification: I'm tired of being harassed by software whose makers have suddenly turned on long-time paying customers by ignoring their deliberate choices and configurations. And I feel that most acutely with Windows, the computing platform I rely on, and related Microsoft software like Office (Word) and OneDrive. So much so that I've stopped using both, for the most part.

That's a big deal, but it's not unprecedented.

Two years ago this week, I finally gave up on Microsoft OneNote and moved to Notion, one of many modern note-taking solutions that's appeared in recent years. I was a fan of OneNote since the initial announcement in 2002 and I used it, somewhat religiously, from the first public beta. Microsoft created OneNote as a killer app for the Tablet PC, but its central innovation, impressive for that time, was that there were no documents to save or manage. I felt like OneDrive had been created just for me, a sentiment I later learned was common among the journalists who covered Microsoft at the time.

Unfortunately, OneNote got caught up in the existential crisis of Windows 8 and the Windows Runtime mobile apps platform. After halfheartedly supporting WinRT with mobile app versions of the core Office apps that ran on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone, the Office team finally gave up and continued forward with the legacy Win32 desktop apps that we still use today. The one outlier was OneNote: The WinRT version of OneNote, initially called OneNote MX, offered a simpler and more modern user interface than the busy, complex desktop version, and in the shift to Windows 10, it briefly became the default OneNote experience for everyone. Until, of course, it wasn't: A year later, the Office team reversed that decision, deprecated the WinRT app—by then called OneNote for Windows 10—and brought back the desktop app from the dead.

I loved OneNote MX/Windows 10, but more pragmatic concerns got in the way: I had used OneNote for the Windows Weekly show notes since at least 2011, when Mary Jo Foley joined the show, and we soldiered forward for over a decade, suffering through the weekly indignity of OneNote not being able to handle what by then was considered a basic collaboration feature for such a product: We could not edit the show notes concurrently because doing so introduced an endless series of sync errors. And by 2022, I had finally had enough and was looking around for...