From outlinerimpostors.com: "Posted by Stephen R. Diamond - Feb 16, 2015 at 02:47 AM - They’re being incredibly stingy with their “free” version: They still don’t allow it to open new notebooks except on OneDrive."

Being on XP (on which ON 2013 does not run), I cannot confirm, but this seems to be VERY important information.

I've got ON 2003, together with a pc, and ON 2003 is shit; deinstalled it almost immediately. On the other hand, more recent versions seem to have been MUCH better, at least in some respects: It's been told that ON's capabilities re audio/video and, more important for most users, re text recognition / ocr, are outstanding, or to be more precise, are comparable with those of EverNote only, with which (to a lesser degree in the case of ON) it shares the incredible "flatness" of possible IM.

Now you know there are dozens of traditional, so-called "2-pane" outliners, which all LACK these functionalities, and as for EN, at least, it's known that there are MILLIONS of paying users, ON being a program that will probably be paid for by 95 or more p.c. of its customers by buying some "Office" package in which ON is same part (whilst Outlook is not, indicating that MS seems to have given up trying to sell OL to the non-corporate clientele (since the price for OL alone is outrageous).

On the other hand, all those traditional 2-pane outliners combined are sold perhaps at some 20,000 or 30,000 pieces (make it 50,000 if you want, nobody knows, I'm extrapolating from the reach of their respective fora (or lack of such)), compared with the millions of sw copies MS and EN have brought to people in need of some "outlining" / basic IM for web snippets and all that.

Also, there is the aspect of some traditional outliners, and then ON, too (? - but not EN?), INDEXING EXTERNAL pdf's, Word files and such, which is obviously a VERY important aspect in all this (but which curiously does not bring THAT many customers to traditional outliner makes that offer that feature).

Now again, from the above, I had been musing in the past already to what degree a REALLY FREE ON would have impact on the outliner market as a whole: Judging from the success of EN, and from the above-mentioned superiority of both EN and ON in some respects over their more traditional competitors, the WORST is to be feared for traditional outliners, which will have simply be LEFT BEHIND by EN / ON, and the fact that neither of those offers "real hierarchy" (i.e. ON's hierarchical storage is awkward and rather flat, whilst any hierarchy in EN is simply inexistant (from what I've been explained)) does not have been a real obstacle to either EN (for which that's a proven fact) or ON (where it's always been fascinating to see that MS "has" (???) to give away ON for free, whilst they NEVER give anything for free whenever they are able to make some bucks with/out of it). (To TRY to explain this a little better, you could assume that EN is consistent in their abolition of hierarchical storage, where ON tries to "serve both worlds", i.e. flat, AND "deep" information structuring, and hence (and obviously, cf. their giving it away) much less convincing).

All this said, there's another factor playing here that cannot be underestimated: Whilst many people now judge ON sort of a "Trojan horse" or at least don't like the idea they don't have their things on their own hdd anymore, EN's success clearly shows that for any man or woman thinking along these lines, there are 200 or 500 letting go of it, and being quite happy with web-based-only/or-primarily* storage...

* = your working files in the web, with perhaps some backup even on your hdd

... which would better explain WHY MS just SEEMS to repeat their previous mistakes: Not making available ON-free-version, even by option, for exclusive-use-on-hdd, does NOT seem to cut them off from that many possible users indeed, in light of the above. (Note that most traditional outliners do NOT offer web / group functionality, which may have been deeply cutting into their sales figures for quite some time now.)

And yes, it's perfectly possible for MS to PUT AN END, ANYTIME, to ON-web being free. I'm not alleging they would then steal your data; in fact they would never do such a primitive thing. But they will get you into some sort of "subscription", even for ON, when time is ripe for them to do so, and be it "just" by linking ON to some "superior-value" subscription, i.e. ON not being contended within the lesser, "basic" ones - as for your data, it will forever stay available in "reading mode", and even will stay "exportable" (in some quite basic formats you'll be certain to not fall in love with, be assured); thus, ON-free users will subscribe the needed subscriptions in order for ON "actively" staying available.

Whatever, MS killed quite SOME superior sw makes, or then simply bought them, too (Visio), and traditional outliners seem to be quite doomed indeed... as I have said some time ago over at outlinerimpostors.com... but with MS' latest moves re ON, their willingness to overtake that outline market, too, has become even more evident than it had been before.

It'll be of quite some interest to see if they try to follow EN's concept of being totally flat (before trying to kill EN, that is, and that goes without saying), or if they offer some more depth than than they currently do, and then, in which way they will bring that to us (since they are smart enough in order to have "checked" that their current, hybrid outlining structure isn't that well received by anybody, and harms their overtaking the market).

(Over there at outlinerimpostors.com, they censor any try to look ahead or look beyond the obvious, thus I dare annoy fellow readers here on DC with such musings, but I promise I'll only do it here and there and in the appropriate threads, not willy-nilly. Also, a classic afterwit, but it's really spot-on, onto those and onto such people, see my new motto over here; no pun intended to fellow readers, or only some of them, speaking of a minimal minority here.)