Microsoft@Eric Pellegrini I would "respond to those statements" as follows:
Where is this blog post you mention? It certainly isn't the one which is the subject of this discussion thread. @William Devereux did not state that "OneNote wasn't quite ready to replace all the features of the w32 version" - he certainly should have, perhaps omitting the word "quite". What he said was "We’d love for you to start using OneNote for Windows 10 today, however we know some of you might not be ready yet.". He's not saying that OneNote Lite is not ready to replace the proper desktop version - he's saying it's the users who aren't ready. In my opinion the blog is PR and spin, attempting to talk up a less capable product and gloss over the decision to discontinue OneNote 2016.
If your personal requirements for OneNote are met by OneNote Lite then great. There's nothing wrong with providing a simplified version of an app for people who do not need more extensive feature sets - the more people using OneNote, the better. There are many current and historical examples of this e.g. the old Microsoft Works vs the full version of Office, Windows Mail vs Outlook, WordPad vs Word, etc. Indeed I'm sure I myself barely scratch the surface of Word and Excel. But that doesn't mean that everybody's needs can be met by a simplified version - imagine the outcry if something similar was proposed with Excel. My own personal OneNote requirements are probably of medium complexity - I certainly use a good deal of OneNote 2016's features and would like more to be added. But I would never assume that others' needs are the same as mine - it is surely self-evident that, for notes, the different ways people and organisations might use them are very varied and therefore a comprehensive feature set is necessary.
The main problem I have with the original blog post is the tone. I don't particularly care what underlying architecture is used for OneNote - what I care about is that it works. When I read a blog entitled "The best version of OneNote on Windows" containing statements like "over the last few years we’ve been focused on making OneNote for Windows 10 the best version of OneNote on Windows", and then I try OneNote Lite, it worries me deeply. Does Microsoft honestly think that OneNote Lite is good enough as a replacement for Full OneNote, maybe with a few unspecified features added at unspecified points in the future? Is this what I need to adjust down to in a few years? Seriously? I'll tell you what features from OneNote 2016 I would like added to OneNote Lite - all of them. Why is this even a question? Why would we want to lose functionality? Why would we want to go backwards?
For me this is PR and spin taken too far. OneNote Lite is not "ready enough" yet and the decision to cease development of OneNote 2016 is at best premature and at worst an outright mistake. Amongst all the criticism here, one should remember that the reason many people are unhappy is that they like OneNote 2016 and it meets their needs - a credit to the Microsoft team. When you have become used to such great functionality, it's rather worrying when Microsoft tells you it's being replaced by something that you can see is clearly inferior but they maintain is good enough. As I stated in my original post I would always have protested this decision as I am a big fan of the desktop version and maintain that it is a mistake to terminate it. However I would have been a lot more comfortable with a more honest approach from Microsoft and @William Devereux where they clearly acknowledge the reality that OneNote Lite is not ready to replace OneNote 2016. For me the gap between them at the moment is so large as to make the attempt to "talk up" OneNote Lite quite worrying, as if Microsoft have decided that this is now what constitutes "good enough". Compare the settings dialogues between OneNote 2016 and OneNote Lite. Look at all the commands available in the OneNote 2016 Quick Access Toolbar. It's not reasonable to suggest that the apps are comparable at the moment.
Regarding your other points @Eric Pellegrini, the transition period is of course helpful but I want a long term, stable solution - at the moment I'm faced with a deadline of 2025 and the uncertain hope that OneNote Lite is developed to at least match OneNote 2016. The tone of the blog does not give me confidence that this will happen as apparently Microsoft think OneNote Lite in its present condition is good enough or very close to it. I can imagine that businesses might feel this even more acutely and be considering their options. I'm not sure what you mean with your last point as the offline notebook issue doesn't affect me at the moment.
