Interview: Ken Case - CEO, The Omni Group

Most Mac users have probably heard of OmniOutliner since it comes with new Macs, many are not aware of The Omni Group or their other incredible apps. For those of you who don’t know, OmniOutliner is a very poweful outlining app that allows you to create, collect, and organize information. Some other notable apps in the Omni family are OmniGraffle (diagramming - similar to Microsoft’s Visio), OmniPlan (project management), and the still in private beta OmniFocus (a GTD app). I was lucky enough to get an interview with the CEO of The Omni Group, Ken Case.

Steve: Ken, thank you so much for joining me. First of all, I’d like to know how you got into software development?

Ken: I’ve been fascinated by computers for as long as I can remember, but I finally got a chance to use one briefly in the late ’70s when my mother took a class that used the University’s Cyber mainframe (I helped her prepare her decks of punch cards). My first long-term access to a computer was in 1980 when my school bought an Apple II; I read through all the manuals over the summer, and have been writing code ever since.

Steve: How did you decide you wanted to develop solely for the Macintosh platform?

Ken: Through the mid-’80s, I programmed as many different types of computers as I could get my hands on. I was intrigued by the Macintosh when it was introduced (and read through the photocopied prerelease volumes of Inside Macintosh at the computer center’s library), but didn’t spend much time with it because while it had some great user features, it seemed very limited from a developer’s perspective compared to the UNIX systems that were my preferred platform at the time.

Then NeXT appeared on the scene, giving us a computer with a Mac-like interface built on top of a powerful UNIX-based operating system. At first I was hesitant to do much work on it, because I didn’t want my programs to get stuck on a single platform. But as I learned Objective C and the NeXT frameworks (which later evolved into Cocoa) I realized that I was facing a crossroads: I could keep developing for the least common UNIX denominator, or I could start really taking advantage of the NeXT platform and become a much more productive developer.

I chose to focus on the environment that made me the most productive. And 18 years later, here I am! (For those who don’t know the intervening history, Apple bought NeXT a little over ten years ago and turned it into the foundation of Mac OS X.)

Steve: I see from your website that you have a relatively small group of employees all local to Seattle. Do you find this results in a more productive team and better products?

Ken: Yes. I did a lot of remote collaboration on open source projects in the ’80s and enjoyed it, but there’s nothing like being able to just sit down with somebody in person to hammer out ideas.

Steve: All of The Omni Group’s software programs are very innovative and very well regarded in the Mac community. Where do you get your ideas?

Ken: I think there are several essential components to the way we build our software: we have a very talented and creative team, we listen to our customers, and we keep iterating. We wouldn’t get far without a great team—and that’s where our ideas start. But we might go a long ways in the wrong direction if we didn’t make a point of listening to what our customers are telling us, so we build customer feedback into our development process. And when we don’t get something right on the first try, we try something else!

Steve: What is it like being the CEO of a company like The Omni Group?

Ken: I can’t imagine a better job: I’m surrounded by a lot of great people working on a lot of great projects. One of the hardest challenges is deciding where to put our energy next: there are lots of great apps out there that nobody has written yet that we’d love to write, but at the same time there are lots of great features that we’d like to add to the apps we’ve already written!

One of the hardest decisions we made this decade was to stop taking consulting contracts so we could focus all our energy on developing our own products. (It was also a bit of an act of faith, since those consulting contracts were paying a lot of the bills!) Fortunately, that paid off in spades.

Coming from a programming background, I have my own peculiar challenges. For example, I have to remind myself to think not only about the great new features we could add to our software, but also about the non-programming things we could be doing which might help our customers even more: things like publishing screencasts (which make it easier to learn the products), or making it easier to find stencils for OmniGraffle, or hiring more people to help with our email load so we can respond to our customers more quickly.

Steve: You must have a long to do list as CEO of such a great company. Do you use GTD/OmniFocus to manage it?

Ken: Yes, I certainly do! I switched over to OmniFocus a few months before we started releasing “sneaky peek” builds to private beta testers, and at this point I can’t imagine tracking my projects without it. (Before switching to OmniFocus, I was using the Kinkless scripts in OmniOutliner.)

Steve: What’s your current hardware setup?

Ken: My primary computers at work and home are both Mac Pros with Apple cinema displays. My laptop is a first-generation MacBook Pro, but I haven’t been using it nearly as much since getting my iPhone. (I tend to program at my desks, and use my iPhone to check my email when I’m not at them.)

Steve: Other than software from The Omni Group, what else is in your dock?

Ken: The other permanent residents are Quicksilver, Terminal, Xcode, Mail, and Activity Monitor (set to display the CPU history).

Steve: Are you planning on developing any applications for the iPhone?

Ken: We’ve written a web interface for OmniFocus, but would love to replace it with something more powerful if Apple ever opens up a native SDK.

Steve: I am a huge fan of your software and I have been running OmniFocus beta for a while. Is there anything new you can tell me about OmniFocus?

Ken: I’m not sure there’s much new stuff to share, given that we publish several new builds each day to all our (13,000+) private beta testers. But what we’re currently working on is finishing three major features (Perspectives, Printing, and email capture), and then we’ll be looking to see what rough spots remain that we need to polish up before shipping a 1.0 release.

Steve: Do you have any other killer apps in the works?

Ken: Did I mention it’s difficult to decide whether to put energy into writing new apps or into adding major new features to our existing apps? With OmniFocus we’ll have written three new apps in a row, so I think it’s time to add some major new features to our existing apps.

Steve: Thank you very much for your time! It was a pleasure interviewing you. Good luck on whatever is coming next from The Omni Group!

Ken: It was my pleasure. Thank you!

* Editor: photo courtesy of Arstechnica