The Omni Group

You know, it's tough to be a marketing weasel in a company like Omni. I'm forbidden from telling outright lies, or padding product copy with too much rich, delicious, creamery hyperbole. I can't email all of our customers with Enticing Limited Time Offers because Omni has this totally RESTRICTIVE belief that spam is evil and only people who deliberately join mailing lists should hear from us and even then, I'm forbidden from using the phrases “reverses aging” or “consolidate debt”, and the word “enlarges”.  (Which is too bad, because I had this great campaign idea about OmniPlan Enlarging Your Productivity 2 To 5 Inches, but apparently that's a NO GO.)

Omni actually cares about being as genuine as possible, and not dripping sales-slime all over the place as we conduct our business. Then again, we are a business, and even though we don't want to trick people, even though we want you to make your purchase because you're happy with what we're offering, we do sort of have to, you know, ask for the sale.

So I'm hoping you can give us some feedback on an issue we've been struggling with lately. As you may know, we offer demo versions of all our software. Currently, we've got a few different unlicensed-mode strategies going on: OmniWeb lets you try everything for 30 days; OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and OmniPlan limit you to 20 items or less, and OmniDiskSweeper disables the “delete” button. You can download one-day trial licenses for any product on our website, too.

Here's our challenge:

• We'd like to have a consistent approach to these demos

• We'd like to allow a potential customer to adequately try the features of a given app

• We don't want to be too annoying

• We do want to encourage people to make the purchase if they like it

• We can't let people use our software for free (well, except for OmniDictionary)

What are your thoughts? When you use demo software, what system works best for you—that is, doesn't drive you nuts, helps you determine whether you like it, and ultimately makes it easy for you to buy it?

Molly found these very very small office supplies that somehow or other came with the booth at the Macworld Expo or perhaps were secreted into our space by tiny molemen who visit us from another dimension, at this point I am completely unsure.

The set includes a small stapler, a tiny tape dispenser, and a half-pinted hole punch. Not shown are the petite post-it notes and the confusingly normal-sized paper clips and rubber bands.

Bill is of the opinion that they resemble the application icons of Panic, and I tend to agree—Cabel, if you ever decide to start making office supplies instead of awesome software, it looks like you may have a little (snicker) competition.

I'm all for miniaturization, but please, let's do so with small (another snicker) doses. Surprisingly, the word nano doesn't appear to anywhere near the small case these came in.

The Omni Group is looking for a System Guru Ranger to help maintain our Mac OS X servers and workstations.  If you're interested, read through the System Guru Ranger section of our jobs page and send us your resumé!

Recently I was reading about the ad agency that came up with the original AFLAC duck campaign. It's one of those amazing marketing success stories: AFLAC went ten years struggling to figure out a way for people to remember their name, and with Kaplan Thaler's commercials their brand awareness went from 12% to 90%. 

The duck was the perfect solution to their problem—who doesn't know the word AFLAC now?—and since the commercials were so memorable and entertaining, they also did a great job of drilling home the secondary message (Hey, we sell health insurance! Ask for it at work!).

Companies usually put so much effort into having their branding campaign tell a story, sometimes with huge budgets and fantastic success (Target's commercials, for example: We sell all kinds of crap! It's sparkly! We're fresh and hip and appealing to a young affluent demographic, unlike that grody old Wal-Mart!), sometimes by creating a revolting animated hunk of snot to act as company mascot (I'm looking at you, Mucinex)—it's kind of refreshing to see an ad whose main goal is simply to sear the company's name into your head. AFLAC!

Of course, that concept can be taken too far. You know, that certain product...the one that you apply…directly to your forehead?

Anyway, I was thinking about Omni's overall brand and what we're known for. We do try and create continuity in our marketing communications, but I wouldn't say we adhere to a particularly rigid brand strategy. Which is nice, in a way, because you never hear anyone in Omni's building utter the words, “Well, I don't know, that's not really on message.”

But I do think we could use a lovable, curmudgeonly talking animal of some kind. Perhaps a star-nosed mole!

Or…not.

So what do you think of, when you think of Omni? Do you think of one particular application? A style of interface design, maybe? A group of old-school Mac nerds who still have a pile of NeXT machines in the basement? Why do you like (or dislike) Omni?

As I'm sure many readers of this blog are aware, there is this fine fellow named Edward Tufte who is somewhat of a guru in the field of information visualization.  And if you're at all familiar with his work, then you've seen his favorite graphic of all time, the Charles Minard poster of Napoleon's march on Moscow in 1812: 

From Tufte's website, here is his description of this graphic:

Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales.

Well, since I wanted to play around with OmniPlan, I figured I'd recreate this famous graphic.  The result is thusly:

OmniPlan Original

Full Size PDF

I took some very liberal liberties in adapting this historical data to OmniPlan, but I think that it turned out pretty well. Mainly, the completion of a task is used to show much of the army is dead.

This was sparked by the conversation on Tufte's website about Project Management Graphics (or Gantt Charts), and specifically by the poster near the bottom who was looking to format his gantt chart, but was running into issues using the program he had. 

Feedback is very welcome, as I'd love to explore new ideas in presenting information using OmniPlan.  I'd also love other data sets to adapt using OmniPlan, so feel free to suggest anything you might think is cool.

Omni's currently looking for a coder to help us implement our award winning apps.  Send in a resumé and join the fun!

I'm hopelessly geeky, but here is an OmniPlan document that shows the dependencies for gaining entrance to Mount Hyjal in the Burning Crusade.

Obviously the estimates will need to be tweaked as each person sees fit.  Thanks to Aerdrig for the pretty graph that I used to set up the dependencies.

I typically don't enjoy waking up early in the morning, whether it's to go fishing or watch Steve give the keynote address for the Macworld Expo (in fact, seeing as we had to wake up at 4:00 am to catch our flight down here, I avoided the situation entirely by not sleeping at all, hence, no waking up).

As a result, I head on down to the exhibition floor, help set up the booth, and either watch the keynote information on someone else's website (just like those of you who can't attend), or mosey on over to the curtained-up Apple pavilion and listen to the audio of the address.

It's a relaxing and therapeutic environment for me, the floor is not nearly as crowded as when the attendees are present, exhibitors are tirelessly setting up the final preparations for their booths, vacuum cleaners running over the last little bits of debris and there's an expectant electricity in the air as the last few minutes remain until all chaos breaks loose.

Oh, and apparently it's the iPhone.

Coming in the next post: details on the OmniFocus Macworld Get-Together Thingie, Which May or May Not Involve Party Hats. Stayed tuned!

In the meantime, I wanted to share this actual email exchange with Omni's technical support department:

Subject:  [Bug Report] Water Outside Building

Reproducible? Y

Error: A large (4-5 inches deep?) puddle was present outside Omni Group's office earlier tonight.

Steps to Reproduce:

7. Take sad bus ride home with wet pants.

Expected Results: Stepping onto concrete.

Actual Results: Stepping into deep puddle.

Workaround: Leave Zoka from the opposite door, heading towards 30th Ave NE. This workaround is not optimal, as it requires that the user navigate around University Village Mall in order to reach University of Washington's campus.

Patch:

....and the response from one of our Support Ninjas, Joel:

David-

This is less of an Omni bug and has more to do with the COSFrameworks, as all we really do is take advantage of the easements provided (as do other companies such as Zoka) and when there is a decided *lack* of a leak such as the case here, well, the water tends to pool up and sadly there's not much we can do about it until COS fixes it.

I have heard tell that in future releases garbage collection may be able to take care of such problems, that remains to be seen as I doubt leaves shall be considered in this schema and I'm not sure if independent GC (as is done now) will be able to or be willing to accept the challenge.

A more simple workaround would be to cross Blakeley somewhere between steps 3 and 5. I see you have no step 2, which is puzzling and preventing me from reproducing this bug here. A much more complex solution would be for Omni and/or Zoka to move to another location (such as ~/Blakeley/ instead of /Blakeley/).

Thanks for the feedback, and hope that helps.

Joel Page

Support Engineer

The Omni Group

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