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Comment by lawdawg | Hacker News Reader

Reader lasted longer than almost all of the (major) RSS readers combined. What makes you think EverNote is going to be around forever?

Honestly, I don't understand the stance of using an inferior product (this assumes you believe Keep will be superior to EverNote, if not, then why even comment?) because you fear the superior one will be shut off. I rather use a product from a company that has a history of providing mechanisms to take out my data if/when they shut the product down instead of a startup/small company that will probably lose all my data when they go bankrupt or get acqui-hired.

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There's no reasonable way to estimate how likely Evernote is to fail or be acqui-hired, but we can reasonably estimate how long an unpopular, non-core, free Google offering will last. All other things being equal, avoiding the Google offering is at least avoiding the devil we know. The success of the Reader replacements also suggests that there are business opportunities in simply being the alternative that exists when Google pulls the plug, so I would not expect Evernote to react to this news all that fearfully.

Of course we should still choose products based on their positive qualities and the freedom to use our data as we wish is an important one.

> What makes you think EverNote is going to be around forever?

Because 99.99999% of EverNote's revenue does not come from some other part of business?

One thing is for sure: most users that did use Reader will skip this one :)

The issue for many people is that these ancillary services from Google may be found to not add value to Google's overall G+ strategy, and killed in the interest of staying "focused". Google is simply not "all-in" with some of these services. This just isn't the case for company's like Evernote.

Presumably a product conceived post-G+ will be explicitly designed to add value to the overall G+ strategy, so has less chance of getting to the point of being shut down. Google Reader on the other hand was conceived in 2005 when Google was all over the place and even then the management didn't like it.

G+ is a tricky dependency. There's little confidence in it outside Google and some factions in the tech press.

It's the old pig and chicken metaphor - Evernote is committed to note taking, Google, it's not so clear.

Obviously both might end up dropping it for one reason or another, it just feels like Evernote are likely to fight harder to stay in this market and to keep me happy.

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