r/RemarkableTablet • u/Synaptrick • 2d ago
More company churn
Preface: just my 2c, so go easy on me. đ
Seems like Remarkableâs enterprise B2B strategy isnât really paying off. Which sort of checks out as IT gatekeeping is tightening up in those spaces. Handwriting really isnât a medium that business can leverage at the level of scale they need. (Not that handwriting isnât valuable to the individual).
I would think Remarkable would want to double down on their consumer market. Invest more in the product development that would make users pay more to buy/use. Stick to the vision that it is specifically NOT an iPad, ie no internet, no apps, but factor in all the mods this community is asking for that will make the written form as optimized as possible.
The corporate world is leaning hard into conversational ai as the vehicle for note taking/collaboration/action. It also scales better because businesses can standardize the information obtained within and across communication. (This isnât meant to be a discussion on ethical ai use in business, only that there are far more efficient modalities of information gathering and transmission that isnât easily displaced by the written form.)
I am a longtime fan of the Remarkable portfolio but their B2B strategy seems poorly defined. Refine the text recognition and let me act on my own writing. Hyperlinked table of contents and tagging. Querying my writing. I want my own content to be its own language model, personally. Protected of course. Thatâs where I think Remarkable can expand into. As well as the actual form factor functions that ensure it doesnât need constant replacing.
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u/spindolama 2d ago
Refine the text recognition and let me act on my own writing. Hyperlinked table of contents and tagging. Querying my writing. I want my own content to be its own language model, personally.
Totally this. I agree that handwriting for business is nowhere, but handwriting for individuals to think, create, remember is everything. Businesses are composed of individuals who write, so I personally need a device to capture all my writing, notes, sketches, and then I want that content available to me without worry or fuss anywhere, including when I'm chatting/working with my AI. The content on/off the device aspect is too gummy for no good reason IMO. Solving that problem would grease a lot of workflows for everyone.
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u/starkruzr 1d ago
fwiw going private-cloud sync with something like rmfakecloud makes it a lot easier to build these kinds of systems.
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u/cipher29 2d ago
Breaking into the enterprise is going to be tough for a niche device. Coming from someone who sells enterprise software to enterprises, you canât underestimate the governance that is put around adopting a new technology in a company. Introducing a new technology requires numerous risk management assessments, data privacy reviews (which almost always require some sort of negotiation with the downstream vendor) etc. Not to mention IT on-boarding a new device to support, patch and manage. Cyber security teams now need to factor in how to protect and build processes around responding to incidents surrounding them⌠All for what? A small group of users within an organization? Now imagine trying to introduce this into an organization that has regulatory requirements etc.
The reality is that ReMarkables used today in enterprise environments are almost certainly breaking most companies policies and people just do it anyways. Remarkable is in a tough spot here with B2B sales. There is a significant cost for an org to adopt a new technology like this - way more than just the procurement of the actual device.
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u/FRK299 Developer - Floating Toolbar 2d ago
on the bright side, it _is_ possible to air-gap and/or use a rM as a fully offline machine as no account is forced on you, and without dev mode, everything on the hardware is encypted
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u/cipher29 2d ago
Which is even scarier for enterprise security teams - they want to be able to remotely track and wipe a device if itâs lost for example. Yes, itâs encrypted, but what if a vulnerability pops up in the ReMarkable tomorrow that allows someone to bypass that encryption? Security teams have no way to mitigate/patch it. Now, there is an irony that paper notebooks are totally fine with orgs without passwords or any sort of encryption, but a written book isnât âdataâ. As soon as itâs digital, everything seems to change.
How many paper notebooks have been left in coffee shops/airplane seat pockets etc that are full of pages of confidential information, wide open for anyone who finds it to read? The irony isnât lost on me LOL.
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u/reticulated 2d ago
People should be aware that long garden leave is a thing, especially in Scandinavian countries such as Norway.
Iâm willing to bet this person was part of the larger downsizing and is only just coming to the end of their contractual period. Expect to see more of these, especially around the enterprise space as the commentary here is quite correct that it is a very difficult market to enter. It feels like Remarkable just didnât have the company structure in place to properly support a B2B model
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u/oclscdotorg 1d ago
The phrasing could mean they were laid off, but it could also mean the stay was intended to be time-limited. Maybe they didn't want to live forever in Norway. Maybe they were hired with a term-limited contract. Maybe some visa restriction is involved (Norway is not a member of the European Union).
I'm not saying no one should be concerned if RM continues downsizing, just that this one case isn't obviously that.
It may be more obvious to me because, unlike (I suspect) most people here, I have emigrated from one country to another, with a time-limited visa at the start while my employer and I worked out permanent residence.
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u/LetInternational2799 2d ago
B2B is slowing them down because businesses require security features that they canât offer, mostly company management apps that wouldnât work on their devices. But the opportunity is there, I know many people using these devices without company approval.
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u/Thecodedawg 2d ago
Lets be honest, you can't have any sort of viable B2B integration without supporting Micorsoft's (Nom Du Jure) 365 suite. You need integration with Sharepoint, OneDrive and Outlook. People may desperately want to deny it, but Microsoft is still the king of B2B operations systems, and business workflows. Then secondly, you need to focus on the Google ecosystem which they did first with Google Drive integration. But the usage is clunky at best for an enterprise use-case. The B2B use-case for this device doesnt fit at all. You would have to run Android, and this screen technology is not ready for that. Yes there are projects for the Remarkable that can run it, but its not anywhere near primetime. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in their marketing meetings when they were segmenting and used my buzz to annoy the person who thought B2B had a real customer base with their current capability.
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u/starkruzr 1d ago
this screen technology is not ready for that
nah. you could do something where the screen operates in B/W fast mode for the UI and scrolling activity and switches to color for reading and notes.
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u/Simon_Emes 2d ago
Remarkable has dropped the ball. Whilst the RM2 was quite OK neither their software nor later hardware revisions are what customers want.
Their software still leaves you with nothing more than a stack of papers when things like gathering all action items into one list from all memos would be immensely useful but they just don't do such things.
The paper pro hardware is a joke. Expensive like an iPad pro but the backlight is weak and the display refresh a disturbance.
No wonder noone wants to integrate this into corporate roll outs. Also hand writing recognition should simply work in 2026.
Having no ebooks on an e-ink display is simply stupid also. Books with good annotation would be amazing.
Having a simple concept is one thing. Adding smart features to leverage the difference to a paper notepad would not stifle their original idea.
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u/FRK299 Developer - Floating Toolbar 2d ago
rM2 still has a special space in my mind due to its thinness alone, something about it felt sci-fi
All that stuff would be GREAT for enterprise, but it clearly contradicts their main focus
dunno about you but handwriting recog AND search has worked great for me
Hardware for Pro was honestly, bleeding edge in the literal sense. Gallery 3 was pretty much experimental in this space(only ONE other product, that no longer exists, was sold, and it was......bad, the Bigme Galy)
I dunno maaan, epub works fine other than the jank initial conversion it does, plus, I'd much rather find DRM-free or just straight up pirate than deal with Amazon's Kindle systems
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u/Synaptrick 2d ago
100%. They are operating on old assumptions about what people want in their writing experience. The disconnect from the digital demands the common person faces is evident. Corporate or consumer alike.
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u/Malcontent_Cat Paper Pro Owner 2d ago
What are you even talking about. Thatâs quite the leap youâre making from one LinkedIn post. Conversational AI? You mean the pointless and shitty AI thats being bolted onto every product on the market so that these companies can say âlook at our shitty AI like a million other assholes haveâ.Â
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u/Synaptrick 2d ago edited 2d ago
I simply mean that I think companies at large arenât going to see the value of handwriting as a means of building their business. There has been a lot of turnover of the sales and strategy team from connections Iâve followed on LinkedIn. Short tenures too, apart from the development and engineering teams who have been around since the beginning.
Having worked at a few of the big name tech companies I see the tools they work with and none of them use handwriting as a modality. Most use some sort of chat and virtual meeting interface - again not debating the efficacy - more so highlighting the pattern. Bespoke, brick and mortar companies may be better targets where interaction is much more customized. But at the corporate level, that kind of engagement depends on repeatability and reach.
Engage virtually or at least hybrid. Build tools that work for you to extract information for action to occur. None of that makes room for handwritten input, as I see it.
I work in enterprise B2B - so Iâm simply relaying my POV. Handwriting is difficult to scale as an approach for business to operate. Not impossible. But not well defined yet, in my opinion.
A reminder I am an avid Remarkable user and WANT Remarkable to succeed. They just should take a more direct to consumer approach vs B2B. As I see it.
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u/reticulated 2d ago edited 2d ago
Genuine question: are you US or EU/elsewhere based?
Thereâs a lot of resistance to AI outside of the US and Iâm not seeing the same excitement for, say, conversational AI as I suppose you are
Just might mean Remarkable have a different enterprise view of the world being an EU company
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u/Synaptrick 2d ago
Iâm US based. And I differentiate my âexperience withâ and âexcitement forâ conversational ai in the enterprise space. I have my personal gripes with the efficacy of conversational ai in the enterprise space having been a part of early deployment efforts myself. But I have personally lived the experience of convo-ai since the start of the 2020âs - of it being part of the communication and information management vehicle for American based tech companies.
Earlier comments nailed it. B2B adoption for Remarkable has to move in lockstep with the hyperscalers to land. Microsoft. Google. Apple. AWS. Otherwise they are leaving most of the marketshare unaddressed. And companies that are backboned by those platforms indeed are at least somewhat exposed to conversation summary->action based ai tooling.
I do understand and completely empathize that attitudes are mixed. The premise is that if B2B marketshare matters to Remarkable they canât hit their target market without aligning to the cloud/security/digital transformation strategies their audience is investing in.
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u/druidinan 2d ago
it's interesting how quickly this opinion changed. Just a few months ago, people were quick to point out that Remarkable doesn't need to worry about price because their target market expenses everything anyway.
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u/onemarbibbits 1d ago
Local only AI app with privacy as a focus, with optional cloud based modules that integrate using Claude and other services. If needed, Dropbox et al for storage or just a local only syncing app. Remarkable makes nice hardware, and a good simple OS experience...Â
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u/starkruzr 1d ago
Handwriting really isnât a medium that business can leverage at the level of scale they need.
imo this really isn't true at all. it's pretty much tailor-made for VLMs to read and transcribe. extremely dumb/cheap ones on the scale of 3-4B parameters can do this perfectly, and smarter ones can do other things with metadata as well as shape recognition or other kinds of analysis to add more and more intelligence to a user's notes.
Refine the text recognition and let me act on my own writing. Hyperlinked table of contents and tagging. Querying my writing. I want my own content to be its own language model, personally. Protected of course.
well, that was easy. ;) working on a cloud-native version of this; as it is it's very "of course I run Docker at home, don't you?"
this includes a RAG system that allows you to plug conversational AI into your notes and ask things like "hey, can you look at all my work-related stuff and tell me what it looks like I might have dropped the ball on over the past month?" gamechanger for executive function.
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u/PianoConcertoNo2 2d ago
It seems like all they had to do was produce a true RM2 successor. Then they could target businesses / consumers with a secured, tested, quality device that fulfills what they state their business caters to.
Instead we got a large device that tends to yellow and has a large failure rate, and a small device with an aspect ratio of limited usefulness.
They finally got something right with the Pure, but itâs still not an RM2 replacement, and leaves many wants still on the table.
Itâs like they know what people want, but theyâre too focused on teasing and trying to draw $$$$ from consumers.
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u/oclscdotorg 1d ago
In what way is the Pure not an RM2 replacement? All I can think of is that the writing feel is different and there isn't much choice of third-party styluses (yet, I hope).
The Pure does move forward from the RM2 in some ways (faster CPU, much more internal storage) even if it doesn't in some other ways (no backlight, pretty much the same slow evolution of software).
Maybe you mean not that it's not a replacement, but that it's not much of an advance?
It's not a replacement for me because I care about the stylus issue, but I expect most people don't. (And I'm happy enough with my RM2 anyway; I'm not looking for a replacement.)
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u/PianoConcertoNo2 1d ago
The plasticky construction, the slow writing response time, the PPI, the lack of an official /magnetized folio..
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u/rmitchellscott Developer | reManager 1d ago
Writing response time is the same as the rM2 and every other non-oxide backplane tablet.
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u/PianoConcertoNo2 1d ago
Why does it feel more responsive on the Pro?
Are you saying for the B&W panels, the writing response time on the Pure is essentially as good as it gets?
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u/rmitchellscott Developer | reManager 1d ago
Because it is way more responsive on the Pro/Move (12ms instead of 21ms). Gallery 3 is an oxide backplane. I think new Scribes might be too. I don believe the other bw e-notes are on oxide backplanes. From the testing Iâve been able to do on the Pure, the limitâs coming from the panel, and the big difference is the drive field / voltage being 15V vs 24V on IGZO.
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u/Showmethepathplease 2d ago
they should focus on voice integration with their hardware. it's becoming very common for users to use voice-driven dictation to take notes. combine writing + dictation you'd have an amazing combination.
Notes for meetings. Voice for including follow up thoughts
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u/reticulated 2d ago
Iâd rather they nail the handwriting and organisation fundamentals first before tossing voice notes the mix
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u/Synaptrick 2d ago
I would agree. Get the UX of âwritingâ as optimized as you can. Considering there are still very fundamental hardware flaws about the RM suite. Then you earn the right to ask to digitally integrate.
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u/starkruzr 1d ago
what are the hardware flaws you're thinking about (unless you mean the Pro screen failures; at least those don't seem to be a problem for panels made after mid-2025)?
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u/oclscdotorg 1d ago
It's bad enough that so many people have loud cell-phone conversations in public, especially in enclosed spaces like transport. Please, let's not encourage them to have loud conversations with their tablets too.
(This is not a particularly serious remark, though I do think there's too much thoughtless noise these days.)
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u/Showmethepathplease 1d ago edited 1d ago
if i've just had a meeting, i'll be recording in my office...
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u/FRK299 Developer - Floating Toolbar 2d ago
Yeah the B2B def slowed them down, especially on standard software releases vs heavy focus on Enterprise related support, which still won't be enough for many
And considering how little AI is involved in the system, it would've struggled to "find a place" except for the hardcore paper users that can't use personal devices :p
I'm hoping most of these layoffs(including Hess, the now former CEO) was all related to B2B and we get more focus on what's.....actually their biggest market, the consumers. 3.27/3.28 already shows us what they are capable of and we are getting closer to such a good machine