
Evernote’s 5% problem offers a cautionary lesson to tech companies - fforflo
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/05/evernotes-5-problem-offers-a-cautionary-lesson-to-tech-companies/
======
andriesm
The problem with evernote is not too many features.

The problem is the crap architecture behind its synchronization model that
leads to a sub-par user experience.

Often times on iPhone it only syncs new hyperlinks added after I explicitly
open the app.

The thing has no proper handling of simultaneous edits on different devices -
leading to conflicts - after all these years with so many programmers there's
still no merging algorithm.

The versioning is based on taking snapshots every couple of hours last time I
checked. For real??!

Is this the best a billion dollar company can do?

There monetization strategy is not coherently supported by their product
implementation.

If business use and collaboration is what they aim to monetize - why such weak
and limited features for that? (Sharing notes are very basic, again the poor
handling of simultaneous edits...)

Apple is mentioned as another company with many products - but the
overwhelming majority of both specific products and specific features work
really well.

The same goes for Google.

These companies don't have to cover up for poor 5-10 strategy by pretending
they are working of some mystical 100 year plan.

~~~
morgante
I think the poor architecture is a direct result of there being too many
features.

Evernote has shoved so many features into the product that they haven't been
able to sufficiently hone individual features. This leaves them open to
competitors who focus on a subset of features but do a much better job of
implementing those features.

Apple and Google get around this in different ways. While Apple has a broad
set of products and features, they're pretty conservative in their pace of
releasing new features. So they have plenty of time to hone and integrate new
ones.

Google seems to have solved this through radical decentralization. They don't
really require that different products form an integrated whole. This allows
individual teams to focus on delivering high-quality products without the
architectural overhead of bundling everything into one product.

~~~
eitally
Perhaps ironically, Evernote alienated thousands of power users when they did
their big 2.2-->3.0 rewrite a few years ago. Evernote 2.2 on desktop (+ the
browser extension) was tremendously awesome, and then they rewrote the whole
thing in .Net and basically made the desktop client a webview, in the process
removing about 90% of the features people loved while causing all the sync and
stability problems people are still complaining about.

I want to love Evernote because having a centralized, cross-platform, easily
searchable repository for both binary content and text is hugely powerful, and
there aren't really any viable competitors in this space. But, I don't trust
the company and I don't trust the product, so I won't use it, and I'll stick
with several different other products that together mostly fill the same use
cases for me. One of those is Google Drive, but it's even clunkier than
Evernote (although sync works great!).

~~~
damian2000
They fell into the big rewrite trap ... possibly driven by developers hoping
to clear out some cruft

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html)

~~~
jayvanguard
The article is dubious at best. You hear about the big failures or notice when
rewrite releases take forever, but you never hear about the companies that
slowly lose opportunities or fail to keep up with innovators because they keep
trying patch a crappy codebase. Nor do you necessarily hear about the
successful rewrites since they just happen under the covers.

~~~
jerf
One of the major points of the Joel article is that the best option is usually
one you didn't name; incrementally fix the "crappy" codebase. At no point do
you do a "big rewrite", at no point do you have a big step back, at no point
do you lose the ability to make forward progress because the new code isn't
ready and the old code is deprecated, etc. Even if it may take somewhat longer
to get there, the integral of value over time often still comes out larger for
incremental improvement.

Developers want the default answer to "abandon the old mess and write a new
one" (snarkiness fully on purpose); Joel's point is that the default answer
ought to be incremental improvement. Not that it's _always_ the right answer,
but other answers ought to be scrutinized more closely than developers might
like.

From a professional point of view, it's actually _perfectly fair_ to consider
that greenfielding a new project with hot new tech (or even "newer"-but-
established tech, my personal favorite choice) is more fun than trudging
through old code. Human factors matter a lot. But we are also professionally
obligated not to overprivilege it.

Besides, if you treat it as a serious project instead of a series of hack
jobs, in my experience, very serious incremental improvement still offers a
lot of engineering challenge and fun. I think one of the biggest mistakes
people make is to prejudge incremental improvements as a hack job, when it
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

~~~
ebiester
Incrementally fixing the "crappy" codebase is great in some cases: Michael
Feathers's book on rescuing legacy code is fantastic. However, the limit comes
at the language barrier.

Consider a COBOL codebase on a mainframe where you cannot find developers
interested in learning the language and developing against the mainframe is
convoluted -- you may not be able to pay talented people enough to toil in
those coal mines, and you have to have to overpay subpar talent (or chase
after the handful of expert mainframe COBOL developers.)

~~~
derefr
You can incrementally rewrite, just like you can incrementally refactor. Stick
an API gateway in front of your COBOL mainframe that responds the same way it
does, and then stand up a new well-architected service, microservice by
microservice, that has a good API—and have the API gateway query the new
service (using its nice API) whenever clients make calls to what they think is
the legacy service, passing whatever calls you _haven 't_ re-implemented yet
through to the legacy service.

Eventually, everything will be on the new services, and you can shut down the
legacy COBOL system and just keep the API gateway there to pretend. (If you
can get clients switched over to consuming the new APIs directly, you can shut
down the API gateway too—but good luck with _that_ ; their side probably has
mainframes too.)

~~~
ebiester
It's called the strangler pattern by many. (You probably know that, but our
dear reader may want to follow up.)

It also assumes that you have a proper API to start. It assumes that you have
the organizational maturity to handle synchronizing two separate systems and
the distributed transactions that entails.

The other problem not mentioned in the rewrite/refactor conversation is that
the most common reason for rewrites is that the business has backed itself
into a corner and the assumptions under the first system do not apply to where
the business wants to go.

~~~
jerf
"It assumes that you have the organizational maturity to handle synchronizing
two separate systems and the distributed transactions that entails."

Well, to be honest, when we're talking about proper maintenance and
advancement techniques, we must by definition be discussing the topic only for
those with the discipline to correctly implement relevant techniques and
policies. If your developers or management choose not to, be it for whatever
reason up to and including total lack of requisite talent or experience
somewhere, you've already lost and the only thing that can possibly save you
is to address that problem first, and if that's not possible for whatever
reason, you've simply already lost.

As a result, it turns out not to be an interesting case to discuss. Even if it
is, probably, the dominant case in the field....

~~~
ebiester
I think it makes the most interesting case. How do you level up an
organization? It's a very hard problem that hasn't been solved yet.

In some markets, the talent to handle this type of project doesn't exist. In
other markets, the cost to acquire that talent is more than the marginal cost
of rewriting the system.

------
peteretep
Evernote's killer feature for me was searchable OCR of photos, and the ease of
sync between phone and laptop. But it's been displaced for me by more specific
apps.

I used to keep tax numbers, the occasional bank account number, passport
details and so on in it. They're now all in 1Password.

I used to keep credit card bills in it (searchable images!), but now I just
download transactions in to MoneyDance.

I used to keep business receipts in it, now they just go straight in to
ReceiptBank, and a human processes them, and I can import it in to my
accounts.

I used to keep documents I thought I might need "on the run" in it, but now
there's Dropbox.

I used to keep a diary in it, then I started using DayOne.

I used to have a shared notebook I'd clip interesting articles for my wife in,
but actually Instapaper is better.

I used to take pictures of events I'd see flyers for, now I just say "Siri,
remind me to research event x" and I don't even have to type - it just shows
up in Things.app.

I used to write occasional notes to myself while on the go, but iCloud sync +
Notes.app is better for that.

I still have a few recipes in it, but I have few enough that I'm not looking
for anything specific to handle those. I tried to see what I'd uploaded
recently, and it turns out I haven't installed Evernote on this machine, nor
logged in to it since I got a new phone, which is a bit damning. The cost of
having many specialized apps is very small, and I wonder if there's still room
for generalist platforms like Evernote.

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
> I used to take pictures of events I'd see flyers for, now I just say "Siri,
> remind me to research event x" and I don't even have to type - it just shows
> up in Things.app.

How does that work? Does Things look in the Reminders app to find new items?
Or does it somehow hook into Siri?

~~~
e28eta
[http://support.culturedcode.com/customer/portal/articles/183...](http://support.culturedcode.com/customer/portal/articles/183236)

Looks like it accesses Reminders.

~~~
peteretep
That's how I have it setup

------
Al-Khwarizmi
I'm a bit annoyed about this contemporary mentality that if an idea can't be
explained in five seconds or doesn't fit in a tweet, there is something wrong
with the idea. There are, and have been, lots of companies that have succeeded
selling very complex products where people only use a subset of features
(Oracle, Microsoft, Autodesk, MathWorks, Native Instruments, to name a few in
the computing world). Of course the business model of do one simple thing and
do it well can also succeed, we all know that, but it's not the One True Way
as many people seem to think nowadays.

Evernote is doing badly because the product isn't that good, not due to this
postmodern babble.

~~~
braythwayt

      > I'm a bit annoyed about this contemporary mentality that if
      > an idea can't be explained in five seconds or doesn't fit
      > in a tweet, there is something wrong with the idea.
    

I agree that not all products should be explainable in five seconds. But their
_value proposition_ should be explainable in five seconds.

And if the product can't be explained in five seconds to someone who is not a
specialist in the field, or a regular user, so be it.

But if someone has been using the product for a year, they ought to be able to
grasp and articulate the value proposition. If most of your long-time users
can't explain what the product dos for them, you have a problem.

Finally, if each long-time user articulates what it does for them, but every
explanation is different, you have a coherence problem. That's fundamentally
what is being explained in the post:

Evernote itself can't explain what it does, and each happy user has a
different explanation, based on the 5% of the product they happen to use.

This makes it nearly impossible to focus efforts on giving any one user an
amazing experience.

~~~
thanatropism
Explain Wolfram Inc's value proposition in five seconds, or two complete
sentences.

~~~
braythwayt
Perhaps you should ask someone who uses it.

~~~
jerf
I'm also at a bit of a loss of what point "There may be a second product in
the world that is similarly unfocused" is supposed to be making. Yes...
Evernote isn't the only one...? And...? (I mean, literally, I don't even know
if it's intended in support of your point or in disagreement.)

------
achow
The author takes examples of Google Yahoo and other companies about “5%”
problem, but conveniently forgets about Microsoft.

Microsoft infact is a fine example of how to milk a complex & diverse product
portfolio and how to adapt to market trends. Office itself (which is/was
notorious for the “5%” complexity) is one of the healthiest business for
Microsoft today.

~~~
volaski
Microsoft provided something that didn't exist at its time (the most user
friendly productivity software on the largest OS platform). If you provide
something that's immediately useful and there's not really much of an
alternative, people will use it no matter how complex it is. Coming back to
Evernote, it doesn't have a single competitive advantage and it doesn't own
any platform. There are tons of simpler alternatives for each of its features.
It's a different story.

~~~
leereeves
What did Microsoft provide that didn't exist at its time?

Ami[1] was the first word processor for Windows, and Lotus 1-2-3 was available
for Windows 3.0 (the first commercially successful version of Windows).

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%AD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%AD)

~~~
achow
To further add to your point..

XBox (when PS existed), Azure, CRM, SQL, and many others which little bit of
research would show up.

~~~
volaski
How many meaningful competing products does Xbox have? You can count with one
hand. Same goes for Azure. Now think about how much competition Evernote has.
There are tons in each category. Heck I can even build my own note app in an
hour using Dropbox, iCloud or any other cloud storage providers (which by the
way are much more stable than Evernote) Lastly I don't know what you mean by
CRM and SQL (since they're a category and not exactly a product) but basically
all these enterprise products from MOS were successful because they already
owned a successful platform--Windows. Evernote doesn't have any successful
platform and its product had too much competition with little competitive
advantage.

~~~
achow
Microsoft CRM & Microsoft SQL are products.

Gartner- Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM are leading the way as two of
the fastest growing CRM providers based on 2013-2014 findings.
[http://ledgeviewpartners.com/blog/market-share-analysis-
from...](http://ledgeviewpartners.com/blog/market-share-analysis-from-gartner-
shows-47-of-crm-systems-saas-based/)

XBox came in when there were very few competition to PS. PS was the platform
of choice (for game developers). Microsoft created an alternative platform (it
is like someone else creating an alternative to Windows today).

Evernote had all the advantages when they launched, they over took Microsoft's
OneNote in no time in terms of mindshare. Infact when Evernote launched there
were hardly any cross device note taking app (other than Microsoft's).

Evernote was darling of investors, had the field wide open, but they had to
dig their own grave by not paying attention to product management and
engineering (the fundamentals).

------
anthonybsd
I'm actually more alarmed by the apps they use as an example of focused
approach:

>During an appearance on stage last year, Snapchat CEO Evan >Spiegel said his
company rejects the overwhelming majority >of things his teams build.

>“I would say we’d probably release about one percent of the >products we’re
working on,” Spiegel said. “We build stuff >all the time that’s never
released. It’s just terrible.”

If that is to be believed, it would seem that Snapchat is spectacularly poor
in their design and planning efforts. Can you imagine Toyota discarding 99% of
their R&D?

~~~
monatron
Maybe.

I'm not sure you can compare Snapchat to Toyota, though. Perhaps Snapchats
strategy is the right one? I could imagine small groups of engineers working
on small self-driven features being more effective then the "lets sit down and
plan this out with gantt charts and focus groups" approach. Specifically for a
company like snapchat serendipitous feature creation is valuable even when so
much work is being "thrown away".

~~~
ghughes
Doesn’t sound like the CEO thinks so. “It’s just terrible” isn’t exactly a
ringing endorsement.

------
rathish_g
I used Evernote for over three years but, recently stopped using it

1\. Because it quite bulky now. Takes too much time to load on Mac and
Android. Its a note taking app. I should be able to load it in seconds 2\.
Lost lot of data (untitled bug..) 3\. Bugs and Syncing issues... I often see 5
version of the same note.

Nowadays, I occasionally load the web version, just to load my old notes. That
itself looks crazy with the latest confusing UI

~~~
s_kilk
I'm in a similar position. I've been using evernote for a while , and have a
lot of notes in there but I find my usage tapering off recently.

Thing is, I'm not sure what to replace it with. There's lots of apps that try
to tackle one piece of the puzzle each, but I really liked having on "bucket"
to put almost everything into in a relatively unstructured way. I've even been
thinking about building my own replacement, with the workflow tweaks and
slimmed-down feature set I actually want/use.

~~~
dingo_bat
I would suggest OneNote. They have an app for every platform (not sure about
Mac, but the web version works nice on Chrome), and the sync is totally solid.
It has everything Evernote has, and then some more. I use it like a scrapbook
where I can keep my to-do lists, reference info that I want access to later, a
few links, even a bunch of scripts that I need to run sometimes.

~~~
s_kilk
Thanks for the recommendation. I think I had tried OneNote on iPhone a few
months ago and dismissed it because I didn't like how it was laid out or
something.

I just installed the desktop version and wow, it's really nice.! I
particularly like how the rich-text editor works. Seems to capture the spirit
of Evernote quite well.

~~~
randomsearch
OneNote thirded. Switched from Evernote a year ago. I love it. And it's from
MS. Weird. Good weird.

------
mattkevan
I want to like Evernote, but it's a pain to use. I open it up every year or so
to see whether it's improved and it never has.

Maybe it's not designed to do what I want, which is to be a simple digital
shoebox into which I can constantly shove stuff and have it searchable and
available. For all its visual design polish the core functionality is
frustrating and I object to being bugged to buy overpriced desk furniture by a
notes app.

I call it Skypeification. A simple utility - making calls, taking notes - gets
bloated in features and UI until it takes far more space and resources than it
should. At it's smallest window size, Skype takes up almost half my laptop
screen to display nine interface elements. There's no excuse for that.

------
tempestn
I think this is off-base though. The core of Evernote is to act as your
brain's extended memory. Notes, tags, and while it's a new feature, I'd also
say reminders. Roughly everyone uses that, and it's far more than 5% of the
feature set. Maybe 50%. Then there are a number of other features that are
probably useful to many people, like web clipping, and storing (and perhaps
annotating) attachments such as PDFs. Maybe even shared notebooks.

Then, there are a bunch of features which I expect are each used by a tiny
subset of users, but perhaps a larger chunk of users who would be likely to
attend an Evernote conference. Things like work chat, food, hello,
penultimate, scannable. I'm not saying any of these things is worthless, but
they are each useful to only a small subset of users. For some
incomprehensible reason, all the focus seemed to be on these types of features
for quite some time. Hopefully that is now changing.

~~~
mark-r
There's the elevator pitch. Wonder why they don't emphasize it more?

------
habitue
I think this article is overreaching trying to draw a general lesson from
evernote, Google, apple, etc. Google and Apple are much different cases than
evernote. Theres no reason to talk about them in the context of Evernote's
problems except that everyone knows them and the author thinks he understands
how they work well enough to make a comparison.

------
nashashmi
I can only think of Microsoft Office when I am hearing of this 5% problem. At
the same time, the rest of the 95% became a road map of all things I could
become an expert on.

And I did become an expert, but with some help: I took a basic keyboarding
class in high school which taught me how the secretary industry uses MS Word.
Otherwise I don't think I could have ever become the expert that I am.

If Evernote is going to become a full productivity platform, shouldn't this
bloat be a requirement? Or is it because Evernote is a "startup" bloat
overhead fat should be cut? Meaning SaaS companies can't be having bloat
overhead fat, aka full utility of features?

------
soneca
I am one that never understood Evernote. I tried it once for college notes,
went to create my "notebooks" and stuff. But it was not much different for me
of a Google Doc, or a .doc or .txt file on my Dropbox. For tiny notes and
lists, my Windows Phone One Note is all I need, and it works great.

So I just couldn't see what was all that about. I'm assuming here I was just
looking at 5% of the product. But I still have absolutely no idea what else
could Evernote do. The UX was all confusing and messy and hard to discover new
things.

When people talked about how important Evernote was to their lives I would
feel myself as I imagine how my father feels regarding the importance on my
mobile phone on my life. He just have no clue what I do on my smartphone, and
where he have clues (like brownsing the internet), it is just not that
important to him.

------
zerop
I use it, but I think Google keep does a better job than Evernote. Couple of
things in Evernote annoy me:

1\. App start is slow

2\. Update process. It should be silent. I dont want to read update release
notes. Just update it.

3\. Remove unwanted features. Have Fewer buttons.

4\. Editing in mobile app is big pain. I use android.

5\. In general everything must be quick, smooth and Easy.

Positives

1\. Rich text editing

2\. File attachment with notes

3\. Plugins etc.

~~~
rhizome
Wait, what?! For me Google Keep is just post-its with the checklist option and
some reminder functionality. The location reminder is nice, but it's really
not that much! To be sure, I myself don't need much more than that...but it's
just weird to see it compared to Evernote, which I always thought was more
fully featured.

~~~
chii
if you use evernote like a scrapbook (where you have pics, snippets copied off
the internet, files etc), then keep doesn't not compare - it's just too bare
bone. But if all you do is keep small notes like todo lists, or quick
thoughts, with very little media, it's quite good imho. Sharing a keep list
allows other people to edit it as well, so it's a poor man's
collab/mindmapping tool

~~~
rhizome
I can understand that, thanks, I think I just thought EN was more fully
featured, like endlessly nested items, maybe some Readability type archiving,
links between items of disparate collections, etc. That could just be backwash
over old comparisons with omnigraffle, I don't know.

------
CurtMonash
Lotus 1-2-3 had the same issue back in the day, although they framed it as
everybody only liked 3 of the top 15 features, and it was a different 3. They
did fine; they only lost to Excel, which was a better version of the same
thing.

A few years later there was a new management team, and Lotus was even more
confused about Notes. That did fine too.

The key, I think, is to already have a decent business model around the core
of your product-use. Then if the sizzle is 97 additional features -- well,
that can be OK.

------
pcmaffey
This is fixable.

Lots of companies try to become platforms that shouldn't. Evernote IMO is in
the opposite group. It's basically a database for my mind. They should package
their core offering (notes + notebooks + tags, ie. a text-editor w/ dynamic
file system) into a sleek, simple product. And then build an ecosystem of add-
ons people can choose from that are tailored to the many different ways people
can use Evernote.

This also enables experimentation, without messing with the core experience.

------
Spooky23
I don't think the "5% problem" is a problem for Evernote. To be honest, I
don't think the 5% problem is a real problem for anyone other than designers
and programmers.

Everyone bitches about too features until they need something. Evernote's
tagging capability and ability to capture, categorize and find information on
all major platforms is best in class. They bolt on lots of features because
people use that core function for lots of stuff.

Example: My sister used the Evernote web clipper to gather research for a big
school project. She used tags to organized and had todo lists, etc linked to
the subjects and cross-references.

Example 2: A friend did what my sister did, except the research was embedded
in something like 40,000 pages of scanned paper that was OCR'd, annotated,
etc. All in Evernote.

At it's most useful, Evernote is something that you use for everything. The
problem is _it 's not reliable_. It's too easy to lose data, and impossible to
get data out.

------
danieltillett
The basic problem was there is no way Evernote could ever generate the revenue
to support a unicorn valuation. It doesn’t matter how many users you have or
how much they love you in the end it all comes down to revenue.

------
greyman
I must be a minority here, but I still consider Evernote to be the best
notetaking app. Using keyboard shortcuts, I can instantly start entering new
note, instantly search for notes, and very quickly find anything I put there,
even years later. This is exactly enough for me. But I admit that I mostly use
it only for text notes, and only use Windows client. Tags also works as it
should, and the application doesnt force me to categorize the notes, like
Onenote for example.

------
Jeunen
I hadn't heard of Evernote untill my android phone replaced their native
notebook app with Evernote. Since then I just figured it's a notebook app.

So this 5% problem definitely applies to me, and with me probably many other
users who had their simple notebook app (unsolicitedly) replaced with
Evernote.

------
justin_vanw
Evernote's problem is that their product is frustrating and crappy. It solves
a major problem, so people use it despite the frustrations, but they don't
love it, and later they abandon it.

Since they have spent billions of dollars trying to build it already, I will
go out on a limb and say that they will never improve, and that they will
slowly (quickly) burn money until they either IPO (and then continue on this
trajectory but with more money to waste) or run low on cash and fire-sale to
Google, who will just move their users over to Google docs after a year or
two. Evernote is just going to burn cash at some rate until they run out, the
only question is how much cash they will be handed.

------
kyrre
something is wrong when you try to pivot to selling actual notebooks

~~~
TranquilMarmot
At first the idea of the notebooks intrigued me, and I almost bought one, but
then I really thought about what I would be doing with it... sure, sometimes
writing with a pen is more enjoyable or more fitting to a task than typing,
but then you have to go _take pictures_ of what you've written. That's way too
much of a barrier between writing thoughts down to organizing them.

Something like the boogie board sync[1] is exactly what evernote should have
made instead of the physical notebooks. It feels enough like paper and
automatically uploads when in range.

[1]
[http://www.myboogieboard.com/shop/store/sync](http://www.myboogieboard.com/shop/store/sync)

------
galfarragem
There is a lot of "hate" out there but EN is great: In my case for GTD[1]. I'm
a daily user of their windows desktop app.

IMO the sweet spot of EN is that it is a generalist app. With an email client
they would become even more generalist. I hate switching apps continuosly. If
they could integrate a fast & bullet-proof email platform I would be happy to
ditch gmail. This could be an interesting path, Gmail doesn't have strong
competition.

[1] [https://github.com/we-build-dreams/hamster-gtd](https://github.com/we-
build-dreams/hamster-gtd)

------
drk88
For me, the biggest problem of Evernote is it lacks some critical modern note
taking features such as Markdown, LaTeX and syntax highlighting. Its edit
functions have been primitive for many years.

If Evernote supports the above features in the Premium account, I would be
very glad to pay and upgrade. Now, my only reason to upgrade to Evernote Plus
is for 1 GB sync quota. Other features such as PDF edit or offline access are
just useless.

I like Evernote but I do hope Evernote can put more strength on their essence,
i.e., note taking functions.

------
jayvanguard
Evernote is a great product that fits an valuable niche for many people. The
only problem is that it got trapped within a venture capital ecosystem that
wants it to be more than it should be.

------
puranjay
I remember bookmarking Lifehacker posts on how use Everntoe better.

That tells you a lot about Evernote's feature bloat. A note taking app
shouldn't require reading a 1500 word article to use

~~~
jkmcf
It’s never been just a note taking app. It was always billed as place to "dump
your life".

There are many different ways to organize things via tags or notebooks. A lot
of people implement various paper productivity tools in sw like Evernote. At
least, that’s the type of posts I've read.

Regardless, I’ve started dumping most things into a Cabinet notebook and rely
on search, which is the big win for Evernote (it also integrates w/ google
search to show you related items in your Evernote collection).

------
mcherm
Having read this article, I would be very interested to hear what the author
(or anyone else who has the same views) thinks of Amazon. To me, Amazon seems
to be an example of a company that does NOT have a focus (or has been widening
it's focus from books, to online selling, to pretty much anything) but which
has not been suffering for it. Why not? What are they doing right?

~~~
mrep
Probably because they sell everything individually to you. When all of your
products are sold separately, it is really easy to see what is making money
and what isn't.

I think you are just forgetting all of the failures they have had like the
fire phone.

~~~
mcherm
Of course they have had failures -- but the company does not seem to be
suffering from them. Why not? If (as this article suggests) broad focus means
that the company will have problems, then here's a company with an absurdly
broad focus but few problems: the fire phone being a perfect example that cost
money, but apparently didn't distract the company in any particular way.

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Animats
Twitter may have the same problem. The core Twitter experience was popular.
Most of the additional features, not so much.

~~~
mceoin
The core experience of Twitter is real-time, and we're just getting started
with the potential of Video now that we have higher bandwidth & image quality.

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baldfat
Evernote Problem for me: Linux - I hated it when Phil Labin would say that
Evernote making its own Linux client was the anti-Linux way of doing things.
That the community making clients was much better.

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marcusgarvey
I am thinking that I need to start migrating all the stuff I have on Evernote
to somewhere else. I am not convinced of their longevity given the recent
press I have read.

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Havoc
Its also starting to irritate me.

I just need a structured way to store simple text & search. Yet it feels
cumbersome even for that.

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pfarnsworth
And when Evernote was at the height of it's popularity, the same article would
have been written "How to succeed like a unicorn: Be 5% to EVERYONE!".

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bossx
There are too many free apps that are easier to use than Evernote. Google Keep
comes to mind as they have made a bunch of improvements over the last year,
the big one being sharing.

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ylem
I find myself using google keep much more often for taking simple notes or
setting up reminders. Somehow I find the workflow to be much simpler than in
Evernote...

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edpichler
It's always very easy to criticize when we are looking in the rearview, so I
can do it too.

Adding too many features is very common on tech. I don't know what happens in
the dark meeting rooms of these companies, I can just imagine they are trying
to keep growing and not satisfied with what they are.

Too many features makes things complicated, the first thing you learn when are
trying to open a business is to be the best solution for just a persona, and
not to be a swiss knife. Swiss knife does many things but doesn't do none very
well.

I like iPod shuffle, they just play music, but does so well. Apple has other
versions with more features, but not killed the shuffle. Tech companies
usually kill the software you like to replace with another with more and more
features.

I have a simple software with some paying users, and a lot of times appeared
the opportunity to add more features to get more users, this happens all the
time, and I didn't do it because this would change the core idea of my
software. If I want to add more features to get a new niche, I plan to create
a new product based on it.

~~~
criddell
> I can just imagine they are trying to keep growing and not satisfied with
> what they are.

I think you are right about that. A year or two ago I was filling out a survey
for some web service I use (I think it was Feedly). They were asking what
features I wanted and I returned it with the comment that the product seems
like it is complete and just needs to go into maintenance mode. They didn't
take my advice.

I've sent that feedback to other companies as well that have excellent
products.

For Evernote, I think I would resubscribe as a premium user if they offered a
stripped down version of their client. Store notes, images, and pdfs, make
syncing work and have excellent search. Get rid of chat, and sharing, and even
notebooks and stacks (double down on tagging and make a great search UI). The
problem for Evernote is that every user has a different set of features they
would remove. Try to get to a place where you can shrink your team.

