It's quite similar to the proliferation of code editors from 2005-2015ish. For a while, practically every language had its own IDE (for me, I remember using HaXe and FlashDevelop). Then, editors like Atom and Sublime came along, raising the bar. For the past five years or so, seems to be the default. The excellent extension system allows people to worry about features, rather than re-creating the IDE.
When it comes to note-taking, I expect the same thing to happen--we just need a good, open-source foundation. I fully expect that the winner will be a wrapper around ProseMirror [1]. See also ReMirror [2]
But unlike IDEs and programming language support, note-taking is inherently personal. There is no one-size fits all. I am more disorganized than otherwise, but I prefer separate tools for separate occasions. I like pen and paper for quick jot-downs and napkin math, notepad++/Sublime for quick copy-pastes, OneNote for $DAYJOB and org-mode for long term knowledge base and blogging.
I am sure real people exist who prefer one over the other on more than one occasion.
Being pessimistic, but I would bet it will be a walled garden. The solution will probably be key-in-hands and the easiest way for this is a traditional webapp. Not many people care about data ownership and bother dealing with their own file server.
See Notion, Google Keep, WorkFlowy, Dynalist, etc.
It's pretty clear from e.g. Roam's pricing that they're primarily targeting institutional licenses. They seem to have been pretty successful there, too.
Once Athens arrives, I fully expect them to eat Roam's lunch when it comes to individuals.
The killer app is "context aware indexing", not notes...
We've gotten pretty good at recording everything, but recalling it at the appropriate time and context is still the big challenge.
When Roam started becoming popular, I began hearing about Zettelkasten. It's yet another note taking system, except that it focuses on the context of when you might need the information, rather than just what's the best way to sort/archive it. A new way of thinking, to me.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth...
You mean a piece of paper with a filing cabinet? I’ve been trying note taking apps for 15 years and nothing beats a plain old notebook for ease of use, flexibility, and helping me think.
I don’t do filing cabinets so retrieval has suffered. And for me personally that hasn’t been a problem because most of my notes are ephemeral. When I’m ready to save something long term I write a blogpost and let Google take care of the rest.
PS: the main issue with most note taking apps is that there’s just something fundamentally different about thinking on the keyboard vs. thinking with a pen in hand. Digital pens have so far not been able to replicate the feeling for some reason.
For me, I like to save URLs and write a short note about everything I read. Typing is much quicker than hand-writing, and I can easily embed images / math / etc..
Where I think people are going off the rails is thinking that this can work as a business. I'm hugely skeptical that there's a market here; businesses rely on some measure of "if you don't pay you can't have this part of the thing." -- and even if a startup is able to make this work, it's likely that the "value-add" will be easily replicable into something free (as in freedom) owing to the nature of this being a "power-user" thing.
For example, none of these things promise too much more than, e.g. Zim-wiki (longtime user here) -- which itself is extensible either as FOSS, or simply owing to the fact that it saves in Markdown-ish, immediately MAKING it extensible anyway.