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Evernote’s 5% problem offers a cautionary lesson to tech companies
- Animats 11y agoTwitter may have the same problem. The core Twitter experience was popular. Most of the additional features, not so much.
- mceoin 11y agoThe 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.
- pfarnsworth 11y agoAnd 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!".
- 9935c101ab17a66 11y agoDid you read the article? If you did, you would have seen this quote from former CEO Libin in 2013: “What winds up happening at Evernote conferences is that people go and they say, ‘Oh, I love Evernote and I’ve been using it for years and now I realize I’ve only been using it for 5 percent of what it can do,’ ” Libin said. “And the problem is that it’s a different 5 percent for everyone. If everyone just found the same 5 percent, then we’d just cut the other 95 percent and save ourselves a lot of money. It’s a very broad usage base. And we need to be a lot better about tying it together. And I think we have. We’ve got a few things we’re launching over the next few months to help with that.” He recognized it was a problem. At the time, he also thought they had a strategy for dealing with it effectively, but obviously Evernote didn't. They've had a ton of layoffs, and he stepped down earlier this year. Sidenote: If you disagree with a headline, you should probably either read the article or not comment.
- andriesm 11y agoThe 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.
- quanticle 11y agoHear 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.
- porker 11y ago> 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.
- volaski 11y agoWhat 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.
- tempestn 11y agoI 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 11y agoThere's the elevator pitch. Wonder why they don't emphasize it more?
- zerop 11y agoI 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.
- joelrunyon 11y agoThe exporting process is a pain too. It doesn't transfer well to word or pages and doesn't transfer well to html. It's all stuck in evernote...
- rhizome 11y agoWait, 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 11y agoif 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 11y agoI 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.
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- habitue 11y agoI 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.
- kyrre 11y agosomething is wrong when you try to pivot to selling actual notebooks
- TranquilMarmot 11y agoAt 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
- danieltillett 11y agoThe 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.
- achow 11y agoThe 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 11y agoMicrosoft 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 11y agoWhat 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
- puranjay 11y agoI 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 11y agoIt’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).
- Al-Khwarizmi 11y agoI'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.
- mojuba 11y ago> 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.
- gotofritz 11y agoApple 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.
- mojuba 11y agoI 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...) [1] http://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/ http://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/
- dchesterton 11y ago> Oracle, Microsoft, Autodesk, MathWorks, Native Instruments 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.
- rathish_g 11y agoI 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
- halviti 11y agoI refer to this as the 'winzip' problem. 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.
- s_kilk 11y agoI'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 11y agoI 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.
- kamjam 11y ago
- peteretep 11y agoEvernote'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 11y ago> 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?
- edpichler 11y agoIt'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 11y ago> 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.
- Jeunen 11y agoI 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.
- soneca 11y agoI 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.
- baldfat 11y agoEvernote 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.
- bossx 11y agoThere 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.
- CurtMonash 11y agoLotus 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.
- Havoc 11y agoIts also starting to irritate me. I just need a structured way to store simple text & search. Yet it feels cumbersome even for that.
- mattkevan 11y agoI 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.
- anthonybsd 11y agoI'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 11y agoMaybe. 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 11y agoDoesn’t sound like the CEO thinks so. “It’s just terrible” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.
- bmm6o 11y agoHe 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.
- nashashmi 11y agoI 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?
- marcusgarvey 11y agoI 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.
- mcherm 11y agoHaving 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?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mrep 11y agoProbably 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 11y agoOf 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.
- galfarragem 11y agoThere 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
- jayvanguard 11y agoEvernote 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.
- ylem 11y agoI 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...
- greyman 11y agoI 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.
- pcmaffey 11y agoThis 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.
- justin_vanw 11y agoEvernote'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.
- Spooky23 11y agoI 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.
- drk88 11y agoFor 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.