On Monday, Microsoft announced a major overhaul of OneNote – Microsoft’s note taking platform, think Evernote. According to a note in the Office Blog, this overhaul is three-pronged:

1. OneNote for Mac is available for the first time and for free. With this, OneNote is now available on all the platforms you care about: PC, Mac, Windows tablets, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android and the Web. And they’re always in sync.
2. OneNote is now freeeverywhere including the Windows PC desktop and Mac version because we want everyone to be able to use it. Premium features are available to paid customers.
3. The OneNote service now provides a cloud API enabling any application to connect to it. This makes it easier than ever to capture ideas, information and inspirations from more applications and more places straight into OneNote, including:

• OneNote Clipper for saving web pages to OneNote
• me@onenote.com for emailing notes to OneNote
• Office Lens for capturing documents and whiteboards with your Windows Phone
• Sending blog and news articles to OneNote from Feedly, News360 and Weave
• Easy document scanning to OneNote with Brother, Doxie Go, Epson, and Neat
• Writing notes with pen and paper and sending them to OneNote with Livescribe
• Mobile document scanning to OneNote with Genius Scan and JotNot
• Having your physical notebooks scanned into OneNote with Mod Notebooks
• Connecting your world to OneNote with IFTTT¹

Via OneNote Blog

This is a major announcement for the more than 10-year-old note taking software. While they have been in the game the longest, or nearly the longest, OneNote has lost some serious ground to Evernote et al. in the past few years. This could be a major step towards reclaiming a segment of the note taking industry. Microsoft even made a video to illustrate the new features:

I, for one, am not sold yet. I will never forget the awful OneNote that came pre-installed on the Sony VAIO FS I got for college back in 2004. That had to have been the clunkiest, most useless program I have ever encountered. I haven’t used the software since.