It was a dedicated Mac product, produced and maintained by a company that seemed to care about doing right by its users. So it was a relatively stable application, where as I recall new releases had new features that were worth paying for.

My impression is that ISI sees the product as nothing but a cash cow. How else to explain the contemptible practice of their yearly $100 bug fix? Last I checked, it seems the product has become more buggy and less interesting.

I gave up Endnote in disgust years ago after beta testing the first Mac OS X version (and among other things having a product manager tell me when I complained to "use another product if you don't like Endnote"!) in search of better open source solutions. When I didn't find them, I started working on finding out how to create them.

Zotero is sort of the first example of this in that while I was not involved directly in the development, they are using the new XML Citation Style Language I developed (mostly to use in OpenOffice) to replace the proprietary binary styles in applications like Endnote.

I think the combination of open source and open standards is likely to mean the end of products like Endnote in the medium run, and I say good riddance. We'll have better products, and greater freedom of choice.

It'll just take a little time as projects like Zotero and the OpenOffice bibliographic project ramp up. This is a complicated problem to fix, since it touches on a lot of areas (date, document formats, styling, etc.).