Loose typers: can't we all just be friends?

Well they were huge and had a lot of momentum. They used to have ten times the market cap of apple. Now they have one tenth.

Yeah, Courier, IIRC. They killed it to focus on making windows more monolithic, and lost a great executive in the deal. Definitely a big fuckup, but it's not in the theme I was following.

Don't forget windows phone, MSN smart watch/SPOT, Tablet PC, Zune, Windows RT, Windows Live Mesh, .NET MicroFramework, Band, Reader... Though those are all in a specific vein, they are complete fuckups of varying magnitude.

Interesting perspective. I don't really share it, but it's probably a good thing that not everyone thinks like me.

LOTS. They can be a repository of information for people to share with others (such as recipe lists, or grocery lists) that are automatically synchronized and updated across all subscribers/devices. They're effectively backed up (either pull a new copy from the cloud/server or use the internal versioning to revert to a previous version of a page). They use a multi-master multi-object sync system so different people can update the same page at the same time and see all the changes on the page in realtime (think of a situation where you go to the store to shop for a big event with several people shopping from one list).

These are all features from onenote, but some of these knockoffs probably have some or all of the features.

Interesting. I've heard of people like that, but have yet to have knowingly interact with one.

So what's your plan if your notebook gets wet (rain, drink, whatever) and the ink bleeds to the point of illegibility?

I can't think of any other major issues that can't be solved by a little time, and I assume you've decided you're okay with spending a little bit of your time that way for the other benefits of the medium. Things like needing to give someone else a copy of a page while keeping the page yourself (solution: open each notebook to the source and target page and have the other person read/transcribe), or collaborating on a page of notes (solution: meet in the same place and write on the same page in turns).

Onenote is far better than all of those.