
Ask HN: Why did Evernote fail? - personjerry
We recently saw news of layoffs at Evernote: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18019219<p>It seems like they&#x27;ve been trending downwards for quite a while.<p>I have noticed that there are a myriad of notes apps options (like Bear, Notion), but none of them seem to be thriving where Evernote should be leaving space. In your opinion, what do these notes apps (especially Evernote) fail?<p>What should they be trying to build and what did they build instead? What did they not understand about their users?
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kjksf
That's a big question but let me start with a prediction: Notion is a
fantastic product that will take off more than Evernote.

The reason Evernote became so popular is that they build a great product for
the time. What Evernote was capable of 10 years ago (rich editing of HTML,
storing PDFs, search across notes) was unique and very hard to do.

Additionally they quickly adopted their product to mobile explosion, made iOS
and Android apps.

The reason they are loosing ground is because what they do is no longer so
hard to replicate and they software stagnated and even got worse (my personal
opinion of e.g. their redesign of web UI).

Notion showed what a note taking application built with modern technologies
can be. The model (nested pages vs. flat collection of notes in Evernote) is
better and they are more ambitious (see e.g. table integration). Notion is
just getting started while I can't name one important improvement in Evernote
in last 5 years.

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Crontab
I thought Notion was just for teams. Do people really use it individually?

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foobarbazetc
Suits who don’t love the product in charge. That’s it.

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personjerry
Even if that's true, what exactly are they doing wrong?

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warent
Their product is kind of sloppy with uncomfortable UX. In general the
direction of their product seems lacking. For example, they have a mostly-
broken chat feature that I doubt most people use. Why have it at all? It just
makes the product look lower quality. Also, I find it's not intuitive or easy
to organize/search notes in Evernote. To me, there's little benefit of using
Evernote personally when I can just use the Notes app builtin to macOS, or iA
Writer which now supports tags and has a BEAUTIFUL interface.

For teams, why would I use Evernote when I can use some kind of internal Wiki
or Google Docs for easy collaborative editing? Otherwise some project
management software like Trello or Asana for anything team related would fill
any other potential needs. I certainly won't be using Evernote for their
builtin team chat feature.

