The Soul of Trivial Software and InNotation's Elite

This section was moved from the week 5 update into its own post.

The Business End - What's In A Company

Others' Soul-Searching

Many of the companies you support have mission statements and formal business plans.  Looking at these can be a fun and enlightening exercise. See for yourself if you can identify the companies in the following ten mission statements and core values.

Highlight the missing names to see the company.

• Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
• Apple believes "that people with passion can change the world for the better." -- at least they did in 1997, according to this video...
•  ... but on their website, they say "Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad."
• Amazon’s vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
• Dell's mission is to be the most successful computer company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in markets we serve.
• Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
• Blizzard Entertainment is "Dedicated to creating the most epic entertainment experiences... ever.".
• Riot Games aims "to be the most player-centered game studio in the world".
• Microsoft’s mission is to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.
• Twitter had its mission statement as a work in progress for a long time before deciding it wanted "To instantly connect people everywhere to what's most important to them." 

Some are more easily identifiable than others.  Some are tied to a product; others to a never-ending goal.  All offer a myriad of paths for us to identify ourselves.

 Trivial Software

Trivial Software did not start by looking to make the most money or to gain the most number of users in the world.  Trivial Software is the result of looking at current software experiences and being dissatisfied despite such traditional measures of success.  We think not everyone is content with their software -- we see that some of you are even frustrated with whatever industry that software fuels.

We believe you are part of an elite population and that you're being overlooked thanks to the mainstream success established by a majority.  It is genuinely sad to think that you are limited to the tools of the majority, because we also think that behind that dissatisfaction lies a powerful and restrained creativity.

So... we're going to make tools for you.

Trivial Software's mission is to provide
services tailored to an elite niche
overlooked in mainstream successes.

Let's look at what that means at the product level.  Let's talk about our first tool for you: InNotation.

Here are some top results from a Google search for "top hits", at the time of this writing. 

http://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100#

Perhaps you're one of those that know how all of these songs work without even listening to them.  You know exactly what software is required to record a sound, clean it up, and how to edit it so it repeats across a few loops.

You know more went into auto-tuning than was spent on anything you actually call music.

You know this because, maybe even in addition to doing the above professionally, you write your own music at home.  Works that you consider real music.  You even keep good company with friends that perform your art with you.  You've wanted to talk to them in that language musicians know... but writing it by hand took too long.

That only took hours or days to complete
and it's certainly all correct, right?
Time to write someone else's part...

Using music software disconnects you from your creations; clicking a box to select a note length interrupts the rhythm drumming on in your head.  Forget it.  So much easier to record that melody, import it in, clean up that sound, maybe edit it across a few loops... wait a minute.

This is limitation, artist, and you are not alone in this unintended oppression.

InNotation is for you, the elite musician that can speak the language of sixteenth notes and fermatas, to intuitively create sheet music. 

We will know InNotation is a success if our civilization sees a rise in high-quality, deep, or complex music.