Chris Pratley's Office Labs and OneNote Blog

Those of you who have a TabletPC are probably familiar with the built-in note-taking application called Journal. You're probably also confused as to how Microsoft could release two programs (OneNote and Journal), that seem to behave so differently, and...

Here are a couple of interviews with me done around the time we announced OneNote in late 2002. Hope you find them interesting. http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/12/05/021206hnpratley_1.html?Template=/storypages/printfriendly.html http://www.microsoft...

Who decides what features go into a software product? If a software product doesn't have a feature, why is that? My entire career at Microsoft has been as a Program Manager. You can probably read elsewhere exactly what that means, but for now...

I've already switched from Word to OneNote to prepare my blog entries. I didn't like maintaining more than one idea in a Word doc. I get a few ideas going at a time, and I create a page for each one in a section I have dedicated to my blog. When I get...

I guess I forgot to tell you all the story of the "day I won’t forget" in the last post. It actually started the night before. Announcing a new product is a carefully orchestrated affair. A press release is produced and queued up. This is sent in...

November 18th, 2002 is a day I am not likely to forget. I was in Las Vegas for Comdex. We had been running silent on OneNote from the beginning, not mentioning it more than necessary internally, and certainly not to anyone outside of Microsoft except...

Designing software is fun fun fun. During the OneNote project we had countless hours of brainstorming design sessions full of laughs and great ideas. There's really nothing quite as intellectually stimulating as a tough intellectual problem, 3-5 smart...

Some people ask me why OneNote is a standalone application, and not part of one of the Office suites (i.e. not "in the box"). There are advantages to being in the box for sure. One is distribution. A lot of people will see a new product if it is included...

Designing the actual experience of handwriting in OneNote 2003 was quite a challenge. We didn’t want to just replicate paper, since that didn’t seem to be adding enough value. So we got quite interested in the idea of trying to determine the...

When you are trying to replace a technology like paper, it helps to know how it is used. You can roughly split paper usage into two categories. What you put on the paper, and what you do with the paper. For the first question we knew we had to build a...

Myths are fun to believe in and perpetuate. Myths are also amazing in their immortality. But myths suck if you find yourself on the wrong side of them. Working at Microsoft on products like Word you run into a lot of myths which get repeated so often...

If you're going to make a new product, there are a set of business rules around how to do that. You do things like market research, focus groups, market sizing, revenue opportunity analysis, blah blah blah. These techniques are great at weeding out crummy...

OneNote started as an email exchange between myself and Steven Sinofsky , the Senior VP for Office, Nov 27, 2000. We were talking about how there wasn't much in the way of software to deal with information that was not yet a document. This coincided with...

This is my first post to my first blog. I'm trying this out to get a sense of what blogging is like. I'm not naturally someone who writes a diary or otherwise feels the need to communicate except when there's a question or a problem to solve or someone...