Sometimes Microsoft really screws up.

I suppose that’s not surprising, but it’s particularly frustrating when it’s associated to something that they did particularly well. I, like many others, downloaded the free (albeit time-limited) OneNote SP1 beta release, which is the good thing I’m referring to. Microsoft realized that to get people interested in OneNote, they needed more exposure, so they made it available to anyone for free, for a limited time.

I’d been looking for a note taking program for my notes to call home for some time, and I thought I had found it with OneNote. After using it for a short time, I imported all of my notes from previous applications.

Over time, the shine wore off. I found OneNote to be sort of clunky for what I needed, and the “click anywhere and start typing” functionality to be more of a burden than a boon. I’m sure it works wonderfully for Tablet users, and maybe one day when I have a Tablet, I’ll give it another try.

Or maybe not.

It became clear to me that I would not continue with OneNote as my primary note taking application, and that I would need to migrate my information to another note taking tool. What I’ve been looking for is a personal wiki, where I can quickly and easily make links between related pages. In my perfect world, I would have a personal wiki that is easy to edit in on my desktop (which includes the ability to add active hyperlinks to notes that point outside of the program), and have it synchronize to a related application on my Pocket PC. Needless to say, I’m still searching.

But yesterday, when I fired up OneNote to look up a URL I had stored there, I was greeted with a message informing me that the beta period had expired. No sweat I thought, I’ll just copy/paste my stuff out of OneNote into my next tool, when I figure out what that will be.

Today I decided that in the interim, I would go back to using Notebook, a personal wiki that does some, but not all, of what I need it to do. At least I’d be able to continue adding and editing.

To my surprise, I found that not only will OneNote not allow me to add anything more to it, but it won’t allow me to copy the content that is currently in there - my content - to another tool.

Being a geek, I’ve found a way to pull my data out, but it won’t be easy, and it will be very time consuming. Needless to say, this has left an incredibly bad taste in my mouth. I won’t be recommending to OneNote to friends and colleagues after this experience, and I have to say that some of the trust that Microsoft has been trying desperately to build up with their various initiatives has been destroyed, yet again.

I understand that I was fortunate to be able to try the software for free in the first place, and I also understand that Microsoft can’t allow people to continue using it forever for free. But when the time has come to force the user into action, this heavy-handed approach had the opposite effect from what I suspect they were hoping. If they were hoping they’d get me to spend $100 on a simple note taking application that doesn’t really suit my needs just to get my data back, they are sadly mistaken. Furthermore, I’ll think twice about purchasing Microsoft products when viable competition exists.

As you can probably tell, I’m having a harder and harder time considering myself a Microsoft fan these days.