Oh, the drama! One of the more surprising announcements to come from the annual Ignite 2019 event was the resurrection of OneNote 2016, an application which was officially in maintenance mode.
But not only is this program back, it is better than ever!
In that, no longer will Microsoft be providing the odd fix here and there for this software, but it will actually extend the mainstream support. Not just in name either — the company plans to add new features as well.
All this, after not even launching OneNote 2019 when Office 2019 was released, and instead directing users to the UWP app. Back then, Redmond said that OneNote for Windows 10 was the future.
Yet here we are.
The official reason Microsoft has provided for bringing back OneNote 2016 is user feedback. The company sad that it listened to user feedback that said folks were hesitant to move to the UWP app. And not just that, it also took time for the team to even get the two apps close to feature parity.
Now, it seems that we will have two different applications, with each one better at different things.
One area where the UWP app is certainly stronger is inking support.
Anyway, Microsoft has lined up a number of features for OneNote 2016, including a dark mode, as well as collaboration experiences like @mentions. Both are things that you find in other Office apps, so it only makes sense that they come here.
The only thing that does not make sense is the name. Microsoft could have gone with OneNote 2019 to trim down the confusion a little.
Still, we don’t even know what all this actually means for OneNote for Windows 10. And whether, in fact, it will retain prime focus. Microsoft killing off the UWP version at some point would be a definite blow to its credibility, as well as that of the UWP platform.
Oh, the drama!
