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Ask HN: Why did Evernote fail?
We recently saw news of layoffs at Evernote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18019219
It seems like they've been trending downwards for quite a while.
I have noticed that there are a myriad of notes apps options (like Bear, Notion), but none of them seem to be thriving where Evernote should be leaving space. In your opinion, what do these notes apps (especially Evernote) fail?
What should they be trying to build and what did they build instead? What did they not understand about their users?
- foobarbazetc 8y agoSuits who don’t love the product in charge. That’s it.
- personjerry 8y agoEven if that's true, what exactly are they doing wrong?
- warent 8y agoTheir product is kind of sloppy with uncomfortable UX. In general the direction of their product seems lacking. For example, they have a mostly-broken chat feature that I doubt most people use. Why have it at all? It just makes the product look lower quality. Also, I find it's not intuitive or easy to organize/search notes in Evernote. To me, there's little benefit of using Evernote personally when I can just use the Notes app builtin to macOS, or iA Writer which now supports tags and has a BEAUTIFUL interface. For teams, why would I use Evernote when I can use some kind of internal Wiki or Google Docs for easy collaborative editing? Otherwise some project management software like Trello or Asana for anything team related would fill any other potential needs. I certainly won't be using Evernote for their builtin team chat feature.
- kjksf 8y agoThat's a big question but let me start with a prediction: Notion is a fantastic product that will take off more than Evernote. The reason Evernote became so popular is that they build a great product for the time. What Evernote was capable of 10 years ago (rich editing of HTML, storing PDFs, search across notes) was unique and very hard to do. Additionally they quickly adopted their product to mobile explosion, made iOS and Android apps. The reason they are loosing ground is because what they do is no longer so hard to replicate and they software stagnated and even got worse (my personal opinion of e.g. their redesign of web UI). Notion showed what a note taking application built with modern technologies can be. The model (nested pages vs. flat collection of notes in Evernote) is better and they are more ambitious (see e.g. table integration). Notion is just getting started while I can't name one important improvement in Evernote in last 5 years.
- Crontab 8y agoI thought Notion was just for teams. Do people really use it individually?