> Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market.
Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes across multiple devices.
They were maybe first company I experienced that blew up a really solid app I liked after raising a truck load of VC money and trying to take over the world.
Bingo. When they started to add every feature known to man because they had to live up to some $1b valuation that never made sense, the core product really suffered.
Not everything is meant to be a multi-billion dollar business and that’s ok!
The previous issues were bad enough for me to drop Evernote as a paying customer.
I would get notes that would not sync correctly, forcing me to resolve it by hand. Even after doing that, it would still have sync conflicts. This was core functionality that just didn't work.
During this time, they were busy jamming in features I definitely didn't want or need. Every release would be a slower, buggier version of its previous incarnation.
It was during this time frame that a lot of people jumped ship. The app was so bloated and buggy by that point that even OneNote seemed like a viable option.
It didn't help that Evernote made it as difficult as possible to get your notes out of their system. It took several download attempts to successfully get my archive out of there. It might have also been due to the large number of people leaving their platform.
The handwriting was on the wall when they started selling knick-knacks on their website. Things like Evernote branded Moleskine notepads and dress socks. It's like they completely abandoned their core competency and went off in some left-field marketing direction.
It's a real shame, too, because Evernote was an amazing app when it first came out.
I'm giving org-mode a spin these days on my desktop. Need to figure out if there's a way to sync/view it on my Android device, but I'm getting kind of tired of dealing with all the different, proprietary SaaS note taking services that go to shit after a few years. At least with Emacs and org-mode, that's one less thing to deal with.
It's probably someone who is really into productivity and self-improvement, makes it part of their identity, mentions it to their family... and then has 10 pairs gifted every xmas.
That seems like a less bad version of handing out specific items of company swag ("woo, a t-shirt in the wrong size"). At least you can pick something that's useful to you.
We get a certain amount of money a year to buy GitHub swag, but in fairness, I think our shirts and swag is pretty great and most employees appreciate it/use it.
Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes across multiple devices.
They were maybe first company I experienced that blew up a really solid app I liked after raising a truck load of VC money and trying to take over the world.