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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
"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....
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.
What you are saying sounds cavalier to me. Fact is, big rewrites are very risky and there's nothing appealing about working on them, I can attest! Any developer worth his salt should fight tooth and nail to kill such a rewrite project and then run screaming when business and management go forward anyhow with scrapping the working legacy system in order to "start fresh".
Lost opportunity does suck. It would be nice if the first system was written in an extensible way with lots of tests and correct documentation, but it rarely is. All software needs to be replaced at some point. All software has a finite useful lifespan. So, this is a common problem. But you must have a responsible plan for replacing any first system. Any sort of project plan that has a magic day where the legacy system is shutdown and the second system is turned on is reckless and absurd. I've heard of failure rates for such projects being 80%, with the rest going way over budget before completion.
The best you can do when replacing a crufty old system is to employ strangulation. You slowly, methodically kill off the legacy system one feature at a time with the equivalent features in the well-written/tested new system. You run both systems side by side, sharing the processing load until one day, years in the future, when you have replaced all the features and the legacy system has nothing to do. It's a hassle and it requires everyone to be organized from start to finish, but you eliminate the big-bang release risks.
Luckily, with all the web services and factored out componentry we've been building in software over the past 10 years, the strangulation approach has never been more feasible.
There's lots of good youtube lectures and agile community blog posts on the topic of second systems and strategies to implement the strangulation. Here's an old classic that introduces the concept better than I could:
Or perhaps by the chasing the universal / web view on the desktop unicorn. Native apps still best HTML frames on the desktop in terms of functionality, and no amount of cost savings for the vendor will convince users otherwise.
Multiple code bases may be a pain, but they still produce better UIs when you support more than one OS.
> Multiple code bases may be a pain, but they still produce better UIs when you support more than one OS.
I don't know if that's universally true.
Slack uses Electron for its desktop apps, yet has received a lot of acclaim for its UI and seems to be trouncing alternatives with truly native offerings (IRC, HipChat).
I have always been surprised they get so much UI praise. To me, it feels like the HTML frame that it is, and often confounds my expectations of how a native app works. It is definitely better than its competitors, but that doesn't mean it's all that great. Having said that, it seems like they've wielded the web view approach to achieve a great flexibility and development speed advantage, so it's definitely a valid way of doing things. But I keep waiting for them to switch to full-native now that they're well established and can afford way more developers.
I'd hardly call slack the epitome of usability. It guzzles memory, is laggy on my workstation (Xeon cpu lots of ram and a high end gaming gpu), their search functionality is abysmal too. I quite like slack, but I really wish they would consider a native app, or even just address the performance problems of their chat client.
I do not really understand how Hipchat can be so bad though. The client is ghastly on all platforms and not being able to handle shaky internet connections these days is a joke.
Slack's story is more about their service and 3rd party integrations, less so their client apps. A messaging client needs far fewer client features than a service like Evernote, and can get away with a simpler development environment. A web frame in a box works for Slack, but not for Evernote.
Evernote's client from a feature and polish perspective is as important as their service. The service need to store and sync (where they also have problems), but the client has to cover a multitude of other features. Cutting corners on the client layer to ease development has had an obvious impact on the UX.
And when your room is so dirty that there are bugs in the walls, termites eating the wood, the thermostat is leaking mercury, the ceiling is dropping lead paint + asbestos, and the foundation is cracked and pulling the house apart ...
you burn your house down, and start over.
As technology people, I agree that we lean far too heavily towards the "rewrite it" option than we should. But that doesn't mean it's never the right option.
Worse than that - if just the foundations are bad, you may have to start the house over. Even if the house is fine but you get the wrong type of mushroom in the wall of 1 room, the house will have to be rebuild.
Strange analogy by GP, you have way more possibilities of fixing stuff in the software world than in the physical one.
I deeply get your point, but to step away from the metaphor, usually the problem of shitty code is a lack of focus on continual refinement instead of adding features, which is a management/process problem. If you have a serious problem with your process, you're never going to build a solid code base.
Hell, at my last company, we have a big server product made of duct tape and spit, and about halfway through a total rebuild, we had another ball of spit and duct tape made of a slightly trendier stack. We added coders, we brought in front end guys, but guess who we didn't replace?
>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.
OneNote is the best current option, by far, but taking advantage of a lot of its best features require also using MS Office & Outlook, which is a nonstarter.
> Evernote has shoved so many features into the product that they haven't been able to sufficiently hone individual features.
...and that's a really hard problem to fix as you need management (who may not understand the root cause at all) to be on the same page as engineers working on the lowest level of the product.
If only they had some sort of automated communication mechanism that they could use to share the same pages of information between the engineers working on the lowest level of the product, and the management that needs to understand the root cause of it all...
Hear hear. What finally prompted me to switch from Evernote to Workflowy (even though Workflowy has maybe 1% of the features that Evernote does) was that when I opened the Workflowy app on my phone, I could be assured that I would see exactly what I'd finished entering on my computer, even if I'd only entered it a few seconds ago. Heck, I can enter stuff on my computer and watch my phone update in almost real time.
When I first saw Workflowy's synchronization, coming from Evernote, it seemed almost magical.
> Apple is mentioned as another company with many products - but the overwhelming majority of both specific products and specific features work really well.
Really I find their software to be hazardous to my health. I am okay with people liking their hardware but their software and services makes me frustrated 90% of the time.
> their software and services makes me frustrated 90% of the time.
And the other 10% is spent in Keynote.
Seriously, Keynote is excellent, but Mail is the only other Apple-made app I use, and that's only because I haven't found a better Mac mail client that works with Exchange.
Apple Computer's "Lemonade Stand" [1] was pretty good educational software for learning how to run a small business, while mitigating the consequences of global warming.
> The problem is the crap architecture behind its synchronization model that leads to a sub-par user experience.
One 'bug' that's been present since I started using Evernote: Create a new note, paste content, start typing a title, pause, and have it wipe out the title with part of the content or move your cursor to the start of the title.
What you mention indeed is a problem for its core users who already use Evernote. However "too many features"--each of which is mediocre--is a much larger problem. I remember trying to use and like Evernote multiple times through its evolution and not really sticking because there wasn't a single feature that was uniquely superior. Why use Evernote for saving to read later when Instapaper or Pocket do much better job? Why use Evernote to keep todo lists when there are tons of other Todo specific apps that do much better job? etc.
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.
I guess I'm in the opposite boat: I'd rather use one app that does many things moderately well, rather than ten different apps that specialize in those things.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.)
> Evernote is doing badly because the product isn't that good
Neither is Evernote's self-desicrption:
Evernote transforms the way you work. We design products that fuel inspiration for your projects, from start to finish.
or another one:
For everything you’ll do, Evernote is the workspace to get it done.
I think Evernote and many similar companies could start by cutting their marketing BS and moving down to software BS. Too often the two go together hand in hand.
Apple is brimming with marketing BS and they seem to be doing ok. Every company of that size has a marketing department. The type of language they use doesn't really change the nature of the product.
I disagree, I always liked Apple's product descriptions. Nowhere near the nonsensical "everything you ever needed" that Evernote uses to market a TODO app. Now compare that to the paragraph below the iPhone 6S image here [1] (The moment you use iPhone 6s...)
These companies were generally fulfilling a niche which required a certain amount of complexity at the core of the application. They were also difficult to replace as they fulfilled a very specific need.
Evernote, a note taking application, has no reason to be complicated and can be easily replaced. They're trying to appeal to the masses but have overloaded the app with unnecessary features which are not core to the application.
That's not contemporary. Elevator pitches have been a thing for long time. Those companies , at least first three, didn't start out with complex apps.
On top of all that, internet software companies exist in market, where customer ability to switch to competitor is so high and barriers to competitor entry are so low.
There are exceptions, but for most the have to be The Best at one thing or see their market share evaporate.
Most of the ones you describe are not consumer facing, they are, or at least were in the case of MSFT, primarily business facing. Consumer facing applications have to be EXTREMELY simple to be huge because people have no attention span and will do the absolute minimum amount of work.
Occam's law for software development: The simplest product will win in the consumer marketplace.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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".
He might be accurate about the number of ideas they discard, but he's got to be overstating how "built" they become. If it really is a bad idea, you can usually sniff that out well before it's fully implemented.
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
Where companies develop a good product to solve a simple problem, and because they already have developers and are gaining market acceptance that they just keep adding features way beyond the point of reasonableness.
Then inevitably the company tries to recover money from all of the extra effort they put in the product that nobody wanted and end up making their userbase hate them.
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.
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.
I'll second OneNote. I haven't used EverNote since 2011 due to a revamp if their UI which didn't sit well with me. OneNote is pretty simple and basic at it's core, but the ability to have multiple books gives separation between work/personal, multiple tabs allows separation between projects and multiple pages allows separation between tasks. It helps me structure things fairly well.
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.
I don't know what that does in evernote. I just copy and paste stuff from the browser and it pulls all the formatting and the link too, in the note. Also, there is a built in screenshot tool. I use it sometimes to take snippets from the browser.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Google Keep does not scale well if you use it for a while. Startup time for the web app scales with the number of notes you've ever created. It loads your whole history, and your browser tab freezes for like 10-20 seconds. And subsequent operations are not fast.
It's just impossible that anyone who created that experience actually used the application in a non-trivial manner.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.