There is this festering piece of software that people in my company insist on using, called "Microsoft OneNote."

It's sort of like a web browser, but it doesn't read and write HTML-- instead, it "surfs" over its own proprietary binary files, while haphazardly and totally inconsistently implementing equivalents to HTML concepts like forward/back buttons, and hyperlinks. 'Cuz there's nothing like reinventing the wheel, after all.

It's gotten so bad at my company that there is practically a parallel intranet of massive, hundreds of megabytes "OneNote" files-- monstrosities with dozens and dozens of content "tabs" and "blades"-- that sit in SharePoint document libraries, and that all link to each other. Sometimes when you click a link, it will open in the "OneNote" web client-- other times, it will insist on downloading the whole target "OneNote" file to cache on disk, and opening it in the fat client. Other times, it tells you, "This link will only work in Internet Explorer, you fat slob Chrome user!"

Oftentimes, the links will open to the correct content "page"-- but won't update the tab navigation to reflect where you "are", so you have no idea how to ever get back to that "page". Other times, the link will open the target file, but not bring you anywhere in particular.

People on the new team I just joined at work keep telling me, "Oh, that's in the docs", but then don't send me a link straight to the relevant content-- because they can't. So they pull me over to their desk so I can watch them spend fifteen minutes angrily trying to manually navigate to the thing that even they can no longer find.

Not to mention, think of how much rigor and infrastructure went and goes into forming and supporting the HTML standard, the constant security patching of web browsers like Chrome and Firefox, and so on. OneNote bypasses all of that. Just like in the case of how URL shorteners dangerously bypass DNS, these parallel webs of proprietary "OneNote" files do the same thing.

"OneNote" reminds me of one of those crazy Microsoft products from the 90s, like "Microsoft Bob", or "Frontpage"-- ideas that are not just bad fundamentally, but poorly implemented too. And I hope this "OneNote" abomination dies a similar, fiery death.