Comment by wbharding | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wbharding | Hacker News Reader

The Evernote detractors camp has grown to epic proportions in the past year, which is warranted, but I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version. So many of the customer rants I read are focused on this aspect, and it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for their use.

The reason Evernote is dying is because it wasn't a good product. Nobody could fix the long-term tech debt they accumulated, which grew to become regular bugs in the product. And rampant feature bloat.

There are a slew of able replacements to Evernote now available. The landscape of note taking software in 2019 is a very different place than it had been when Evernote started. For them to beat back companies like Notion (and imho Amplenote) would have required heroics on par with what it took to build the company in the first place. Simply getting sync right is itself profoundly challenging for a company with their legacy [1]. It's years of infrastructure decisions, and a consistent dedication to an unpleasant development task. Newer competitors (incl free options like Google Docs/Keep) were ready and waiting to do better.

[1] I've spent the last couple years trying to build an Evernote replacement. Sync for us is very tough, but must be a pit of despair for companies liked Evernote who built their note content out of HTML

What confuses me about products like Evernote and other CRUD services is - it's just a notebook app. How is it truly worthy of the army of coders, or the millions or billions in valuation that similar CRUD acquires?

It feels like there is a tendency of projects like this to grow too far, too fast, until they fail - dollar signs in their eyes obscuring a reasonable vision of their scale and potential, which is far more modest than they realise.

But then again, the ones that remain reasonable don't get in the news I suppose.

In this case Evernote is far more than just CRUD and you can see that by comparing it to the CRUD self-hosted alternatives which exist and have sub-par syncing, editing, organization, and indexing. For all it's flaws, which caused them to lose me as a customer, it's definitely more complex than it appears at first glance.

Evernote had a lot of odd tech bits in it, it wasn't just a CRUD app. At one point you could take a picture of a beer bottle and it would OCR the label for you automatically. I'm sympathetic to your argument (since that's how Pinboard competitors have died) but Evernote was a universe of its own.

And consider this: performing OCR on product labels is nothing like performing OCR on a neatly typed A4 paper that has been scanned. It is an enormously difficult feat that probably required at least a small team to accomplish.

Or a small army on mturk

I haven’t used Evernote to know enough, but at a 10,000 foot level, how trivial is it to scale any CRUD application to millions of customers? Considering scaling up and out, individual users, collaboration (if that’s a feature, I dunno), persistence and durability, i18n, personalization (if that exists in Evernote), and whatever metrics or information it captures about its users that might be sold to third parties.

Isn’t Google Docs CRUD to some extent? Any idea how much it is worth or even how many people support Google Docs?

Anyway, I’m not debating whether Evernote is actually worth whatever is it’s current valuation. I don’t agree with how can something be worth so much because its just CRUD.

> I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version

...

> it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for their use.

Please don't conflate these entirely separate issues. You can charge a reasonable price for a product without use of the particularly destructive bait-and-switch Evernote pulled in 2016. I was a paying customer (having used Evernote since the early Time Band days), and quit my account in disgust.

I wanted two features to be a paying customer which should have been easy, the price was actually pretty reasonable.

Dark mode, or even just themes, as they would continuously break anyone who did client side decorations until they gave up. Their blistering white theme hurt my eyes to use and last I checked years later it's still one of the most requested features and still not done. You know what had themes? OneNote. I paid for it and even though I preferred Evernote in many ways, it didn't hurt my eyes to use it. Just in case I'm not being clear I'm not being figurative, the white themes in a lot of devices really hurts to look at. I switched back to Android from Apple for the same reason.

The second feature was a solid export option to text. Which frankly I could have waited for and still been happy paying.

I loved their inline images which still most apps don't do as well. They just refused to add the features and broke them if you added them yourself with every release.

> I've spent the last couple years trying to build an Evernote replacement. Sync for us is very tough

Agreed. I'm in the same boat as you, and a huge amount of engineering and architecture went just into syncing. And it still has problems. Being client-side encrypted also complicates things because the server can't just apply diffs, so whole objects are being passed around for small modifications.

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