Friday, July 3, 2020

Why has mind mapping faded to grey?

Mind mapping;
It had such potential regarding becoming a mainstream tool for creating, managing and the exchanging of information and knowledge.

The SEO has been abused to hell by product developers who’ve created yet more clones of products they’ve either admired or simply plagiarized. So there’s a plethora of products on the market, and there’s more being developed as I write for sure.

Some have come and gone; those that have endured are the products that have gained some kind of notoriety merely by way of their user base exposing the product.

Users can and have been abused though. For a developer to abandon a global desktop favorite in order to drag their old users into a cloud based system is almost criminal; isn’t it?

The failure of product isn’t down to what’s the best or worst product; it’s user based.  Remember the Betamax versus VHS debacle? Yup Betamax was far superior to VHS but politics and corporate shenanigans along with the user base of VHS won the day. Of course this exposes my generation and age eh lol.

The analogy though applies today for sure when we speak of the mind mapping product out there. Some are simply genius and some are, well; absolute and utter crap.

Unfortunately the untimely passing of the great late Tony Buzan revealed an abject disrespect for the man and his mind mapping legacy.

The mind mapping arena; that mom and pop cottage industry that gave birth to the software mind mapping arena goes back a long way. There was a few rather good products back in the day; I used a few of them. The genesis of what became MindManager (Mindman) developed by the Jetter’s has endured and become a corporate behemoth. However in the process it lost the stage of being the peoples mind mapping product to other products that stayed true to a more organic Mind mapping experience.

I would say Xmind has become the peoples modern Mind/Visual mapping product due its price point for regular everyday folk. The fork in the road was when the Jetter’s left Mindjet to pursue other altruistic ventures. Since then Mindjet grew, went through struggles and then was obtained by Corel.

Mind mapping fading to grey?

Unfortunately mind mapping has become passe to many. The term mind map doesn’t do much for the modern information manager at all. When we have other competing products that really don’t rely solely on non linear radiant formats and rely on desktop to cloud to device apps that are so well designed, the user really doesn’t need to view their information in a mid map at all.

This is certainly where the mind mapping developers have dropped the ball. They actually believe their product matters to the common man who has moved on and the mind mapping developers are stuck in their mind mapping parallel universe.

Sounds oh so ominous and depressing doesn’t it? But it’s reality; mind maps on their own just don’t cut it any longer. The developers managed to grab some inspiration from their users who demanded more formats such as flowcharts, concept maps, timelines and other graphical outputs.

The dovetailing output to Office formats and project management was rather good too

Of course we have such products as Notion, Roam Research and Obsidian now that have basically offered their users a linear approach that just works for the busy person of this part of the 21st century.

Maybe the salvation of the mind mapping products is to take a look at some kind of collaboration with or to these linear products.

All conjecture of course and we could ramble on about it to no avail.

The developers are notorious for not acknowledging their user base opinions or suggestions for product improvement. And when there is a decent improvement proposal made, the user suggestion is met with the usual “That’s a great idea, we have that in our road map”.

Makes you want to tell them to F***off eh?

Fading to grey? Yes it has over the years; yet maybe a resurgence may be heading our way in the guise of some interesting desktop and cloud products that may impress a new generation of graphical knowledge mappers/managers.

Well I sure hope so.

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