Interview with Ken Case, Founder and CEO of Omni Group
Today I’m talking to Ken Case, founder and CEO of Omni Group, the makers of some of my favorite productivity software tools that I’ve been using for quite a long time on my Mac and iPad. We’re going to be talking about productivity techniques, tools, ideas, and philosophies.
Ken, it’s awesome to have you.
Ken Case: Thank you for inviting me. It’s fun to be here.
The Early Days
You’ve been working on Omni Group for a long time, longer than most of the productivity tools that people are using today. Is that fair to say?
KC: That is fair to say—longer than some of our employees have been alive.
What year did you start Omni Group?
KC: The founding date I look at would be 1992, which is the year that we registered omnigroup.com. We had been working together as consultants before that, but we were working on various projects, sometimes together, sometimes not, and we were always getting paid by somebody else directly. 1992 is when we decided to make this a common endeavor and move forward that way.
It feels like the classic pipeline from the original days of productivity tools—folks who were building products for other people, getting paid as consultants and developers, who took the leap to create their own products. Do you think that shaped what you were doing at Omni Group?
KC: Yeah. I started seeing a shift in the eighties, really, between one set of philosophies where people were just using computers for fun and for productivity because of their passion for it, to “oh, maybe people can make money out of this.” We got a lot more business majors starting to take computer classes in the eighties than just computer folks who were these odd geeks off in the corner.
But by trying to ground yourself in what people are actually trying to do and solve their specific problems—we started out as a consulting company building custom solutions for different businesses—you really have to listen to what people are trying to do and then think about how you can make that better for them.
Building for Apple Platforms
You’ve been building for Apple platforms since the NeXT days, is that right?
KC: Yes, if you can count the NeXT days as being part of the Apple platform.
I think we can now, in hindsight. So what is the underlying belief about platform-specific software that keeps you loyal to that path?
KC: When I first encountered the NeXT platform, I was trying to develop software for as broad a range of Unix platforms as possible, because that felt like the best way to get the most value for the effort I was putting in. At that time, there were probably at least 15 different Unix variants that I was building for.
Then I discovered the NeXT platform, which had a very different way of working with AppKit and Objective-C, and I realized I could build much more polished products with a lot less code. That made me more productive with a much more productive result. But of course, you were then stuck to this tiny audience of the NeXT platform, which was not very big at that time.
I thought long and hard about that trade-off and decided I really wanted to be producing the best product I could, even if the audience ended up being smaller. The productivity gains made that worth it. So I focused on what I could do to help that platform grow and succeed so that the audience would get bigger and the work I was doing would be even more valuable to more people.
How did you help NeXT succeed?
KC: Let’s build a web browser. Let’s build image viewers—whatever we needed to do.
The web browser being OmniWeb, which is still updated today.
KC: That’s true. It’s the one I still use.
I use it regularly. It’s either Safari or OmniWeb. Occasionally if I have to have some kind of Chromium product, it’s Brave. But Safari and OmniWeb pretty much keep me going.
Once NeXT folded back into Apple and took on a new life with an injection of energy, how did that change things?
KC: We had just about despaired that NeXT was not going to make it, that we were going to have to give up on this effort to help NeXT succeed. They were turning into a Windows tool vendor with WebObjects for Windows, doing backend stuff, and though we did some WebObjects consulting and helped build some of those early websites, that really wasn’t where our passion was as much as building productivity software for the desktop.
We started looking at other options. We started consulting for Sun and helping them maybe build Java into this same sort of thing—they were thinking maybe Java would be the desktop. Then in the last two weeks of 1996, we heard that Apple was buying NeXT. We were thinking, “How can we get out of this Java work we’re doing and start going back to Objective-C and AppKit and the environment that we loved?”
When you were building productivity software at the time, what were the actual tools you were selling?
KC: Alongside our web browser, we were still mostly consulting, working on other people’s projects, even when they were desktop productivity apps. The big vendor on the NeXT platform at that time was Lighthouse Design. They ended up getting purchased by Sun because Sun wanted to turn Java into this desktop environment.
They were taking their suite of productivity apps—things like Concurrence, which was the tool that Steve Jobs was using to do his presentations back then, like a version 0.1 of Keynote—and a diagramming app called Diagram, which is very much OmniGraffle. Those were the two we mostly helped out on. We also helped on some project management software.
Launching Omni Products
Apple purchased NeXT, and you were still building some of these services. There was a bit of a leap that you eventually made to start launching the Omni products we know today.
KC: We had built OmniWeb back in 1994, and we actually sold it through Lighthouse Design—they marketed it for us. We didn’t have any salespeople; we were just programmers who didn’t know anything about that world. They printed the boxes and did the marketing. I even wrote the documentation, I think.
Software boxes. Good times.
KC: Yeah. I have them here on my shelf. I am one of those people who collects old software boxes—there’s a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in those boxes.
We had OmniWeb, a few tools like OmniDiskSweeper that’s still around, image viewing, a CD player—just whatever the platform was missing that we could do to help make things better. The other thing we were doing that was more consumer-focused was helping with game ports.
John Carmack was developing on the NeXT platform, building software cross-platform to run on DOS and Windows. We ended up helping him make Doom run better on NeXTSTEP/OpenStep. Then he contacted us when he needed a 3D driver for this Rendition graphics card prototype, and we started helping with porting Quake over.
As Apple bought NeXT, we started porting Quake to the Mac platform, and then helping other companies with games like No One Lives Forever and a whole bunch of games around that time using the Quake engine and other engines like in Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Some fun times.
You established yourselves as the people bridging the gap between what NeXT had been and what Mac could be, trying to help make sure the Mac was going to go somewhere. There were real concerns in 1997 about whether this platform would survive.
KC: Yeah, in the nineties it felt like it was dying, like Apple was not going to make it almost.
At what point did you realize that this is starting to get traction?
KC: For us, coming from the tiny NeXT platform, even going to the larger Mac platform—when that merger happened at the beginning of 1997, Apple was selling about as many Macintoshes every month as NeXT sold of their operating system during the entire lifetime of NeXT. So it was already operating on a very different scale from our point of view.
There was some success there, but the trajectory was going in the wrong direction. When Steve came in and simplified the product line and said, “Let’s build an iMac, let’s build a Power Mac, and just have one thing in each of these four quadrants,” that drastically simplified things. That was when it started to feel like there was a better direction, and certainly when the iMacs started doing well, helping people get online. Then when Mac OS X finally shipped and the NeXT technology really was now the basis of the new Mac platform—that was when it felt like a great turning point.
What was the point where you started to launch the productivity tools that have really put your flag in the ground?
KC: As Mac OS X went into beta, we had our web browser ready, which was well received because at that time, most web browsers did not have great-looking fonts and typography, and that was something we had in OmniWeb. At the same time we were working on OmniGraffle, building our diagramming software. We had already started working on OmniOutliner as well, so we had all three of those products ready by the time Mac OS X shipped.
It still wasn’t enough—not enough of the Mac community was ready to switch over to this completely new operating system for us to fully transition away from consulting right at that moment. But we started the transition at that point. We still wanted to do some more games because we thought that helped the platform, but maybe that wasn’t going to be what we wanted to do forever. Let’s focus on our own stuff and keep building OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner and make them better.
The Productivity Philosophy
What was it about the productivity space that made you passionate about building in it?
KC: Just like I felt it was useful for me to adopt better tools as a developer—that was what made me adopt the NeXT platform—I felt like if we could do something similar for customers who are trying to get work done using their computers, then that would be a good thing for the world. If everyone can just be more productive, I don’t know if it’s an idealistic sort of approach to things, but that’s just what motivates me.
Are we not idealists though? I think there’s value in being idealistic, in having something that you hold up as a higher value. You’ve talked before about craftsmanship as a value. How do you protect that craft ethos in a software and business world that rewards speed and iteration and hype a lot more than polish?
KC: I guess we just tune out that part of the world for the most part. To some extent you can’t, because there’s a lot of money going in those directions and we see advertising for a lot of things that can dominate the conversation. But because our motivation isn’t directly about money—obviously we need money to succeed, so we can’t ignore money in the question altogether, or we wouldn’t be able to keep doing what we’re doing—but it needs to come secondary from our point of view to building great software in the first place.
If we can build great software and make enough money to keep doing it, and if we can help our customers feel more productive and hopefully have them enjoy using our software—not just be more productive, but have it be software that they enjoy sitting down with and using—then we feel like we’re on the right track.
From my perspective, you are definitely on the right track. I still sit down and use the Omni products and feel a sort of lightness that I don’t feel with other tools. I use OmniOutliner for most of my writing, OmniGraffle for social graphics and YouTube thumbnails, OmniFocus daily to manage my business, my writing, and being a parent with a 9-year-old. There is still a lightness and a joy to them that I find unmatched by a lot of the newer tools.
KC: Thank you very much. That’s really nice to hear, and that’s part of what motivates us—hearing things like that.
