Google Cursive can learn a thing or two from Microsoft Journal, its new competition

Microsoft just released a new competitor for Google’s recently created “Cursive” web app. While Google’s app works on Chromebooks, you’ll have to download and install Journal to your Windows desktop or laptop in order to use it. It’s an inking journal system meant to help you take notes with a stylus, but with intelligent features.

As someone who has spent years testing out and searching for the perfect Eink paper tablet and finding that they all fall short of my expectations and dreams, I’ve fallen back on Chromebooks and other LCD display devices to fill my note-taking and reading needs. My latest endeavor was to test out Microsoft Journal, and I have a few thoughts on it. More specifically, I have a few thoughts on what Google Cursive can learn from it, and why I think a healthy dose of competition is exactly what Google needs right now.

If you look at Journal and its features, you’ll notice a lot of similarities between it and Cursive. You can have separate journals each with their own cover and color, you can change the paper type between plain, college ruled, dot graph, and graph, you can scribble out text to intelligently erase it, and more. Heck, even the ability to circle things to select them and then move them around is present.

Microsoft Journal Feature Overview

However, Journal has several features that Cursive does not, like its built-in Calendar integration, the handwriting recognition search functionality, storyboard and music staff page styles, PDF markup capabilities, continuous page-based vertical flow, and more. To me, it feels like Microsoft saw what Google was offering and came out of the gate swinging.

For some reason, all of the big tech companies are becoming more interested than ever in inking technology and note-taking software, and I have to be honest, I couldn’t be happier. It’s obvious to me though that there is an opportunity for Google to improve Cursive now that it sees what the competition is doing, and if it doesn’t it would be a real shame.

Cursive hasn’t received many updates, and our verdict still stands for now

You see, Cursive has potential. We’ve tested it extensively and have even written on it quite a bit in hopes that it would improve, and improve it did, but it still has miles to go before it sleeps. When it first launched in October of last year, it was plagued with loading issues, and even mysteriously deleted a bunch of my notes since they simply couldn’t be recalled.

I feel like Google releases these innovative and exciting applications to market before really almost anyone else, but fails to support and develop them further. When it does, it almost seems like a checklist item once per year or once every few years for Spring cleaning.

All of this has more to do with the company’s philosophy when it comes to spreading itself so thin and not really showing its customers their long-term vision. A direct result of this strategy is that users scarcely buy into its ecosystem’s newcomers, and that’s a shame, because just like many of Google’s other creations, Cursive may not be super powerful, but it’s streamlined, simple, and effective.

I may knock it for not living up to Microsoft Journal, but my heart is split on the matter. On one hand, I prefer its simplistic style and approach, but on the other hand, Cursive was supposed to be a go-to solution for those who prefer handwritten notes, but instead, many people that I know have abandoned it as soon as they tried it because of its initial issues and their fear that Google would kill it off in a few years or less.

Besides, we already have Google Keep for simplicity, and even that hasn’t received many updates lately, so why not make Cursive as competitive and powerful as possible, all while retaining that user-friendly approach and Google charm? I hope that Google sees what Microsoft is up to on their side of the ring and a fire is lit under them to improve Cursive, the awesome, but deeply flawed handwriting tool that has already lost many people’s confidence.