14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has recently launched OneNote for Mac and made both this and the Windows version free of charge, but the company has also promised some exciting improvements in the coming months that would give its own solution a chance to compete with Evernote.
Now the development team who worked on the OneNote project took to Reddit for an AMA session that would provide more information on the new application and to share some of the future plans for both Windows and Mac OS X.
One of the most interesting things that the OneNote team said during the AMA session is that the application will always be free, although they did mention that specific features would still be available with a paid license.
“Forever! We intend to have a free version on all platforms forever. That's the plan. We will have premium features for users who buy an Office 365 subscription or one of the Office suites. For example if you want to use OneNote for business against SharePoint or Office 365, that will be a paid feature, and some other features like version history. But the vast bulk of features will be free. Everything in the Mac app we just launched will continue to be free,” a member of the OneNote team explained.
What’s more, David Rasmussen of the OneNote team said that Microsoft has been working on this free version of OneNote for more than a year, so plans to make the application available at no cost were born after the launch of Windows 8 in October 2012.
“It took a while to work out the details for all platforms, what features we still want to charge for (we are still in the business of making money), and work on the actual releases, and we wanted to announce that plan along with releasing lots of cool stuff like we did on Monday. We've been planning it for over a year,” he said.
OneNote is not the only application that Microsoft is paying particular attention to, as the company is also working to expand the Office productivity suite to new platforms and tries to monetize the growing popularity of its product.
Office for iPad is expected to be announced as soon as next week, as the company has unveiled a new press event in San Francisco on March 27. Satya Nadella would take the stage for the first time as Microsoft CEO, so this would be a really good time to introduce the new Office version to the public.