One thing worse than a bad idea is a good idea that doesn’t come to fruition. An argument could be made for other exceptions, but we’d be labouring the point with pedantic parenthetical asides.
But then — and this is the most curious and apt of things — such meandering discussions have a home, and it is the Under Cloud.
The point is, the Under Cloud is not a good idea, nor an excellent idea — no, it’s a required idea, given its potential.
Yeah, I’m that confident.
So what is the Under Cloud?
A lot of people compare the Under Cloud to Evernote and Microsoft OneNote — which is flattering — but also wrong and misses the point of the fundamental problem it’s designed to fix.
Anyone working on large projects, or doing complex research (like a journalist) knows that folders and tags have their limitations, and that’s as far as Evernote and OneNote go, offering nothing more than — as Alex Payne once said, as mentioned via Adam Pash of Lifehacker — “everything buckets”, or as I’ve described them, digital shoeboxes.
So the goal of the Under Cloud is to become the literal and figurative missing link in the evolution of doing research.
An end to the beginning
In spite of the fact that I’ve been working on some version of the Under Cloud for over a decade, January 2020 was the moment I decided to move ahead and make it public, joining an accelerator, launching on Product Hunt (without much success at the time), exploring the market fit, and so on and so forth — a bold leap, but one I had to take.
So this is the end of the beginning, and the start of something much more ambitious.
Under Cloud has the potential to do for research what Microsoft Word did for word processing, but between the claim and achievement is a lot of ground.
I should make a note of it…
