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Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago That is the modern business model. First you build something so good it becomes indes
by causality0 5y ago
Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago
That is the modern business model. First you build something so good it becomes indespensible then you squeeze money out of it until your customers hate you just enough to not stop using you.
- netsharc 5y agoI had an idea for a website: crowd-maintained list of downgrades for products, e.g. "Product: Twitter, Feature: login nag-wall when you scroll down. First Noticed: $month 2021,; Feature: killed the open API, Date: ___", etc. I still have the idea, if anyone wants to implement it, feel free.
- maccard 5y agoI bet you would get a much better conversion rate if you implemented a login wall on that service though!
- causality0 5y agoHell, it's fractal, all the way from major services to operating systems to the most minor app store apps. Products get better until someone decides they aren't growing fast enough and then they get worse until they die or someone sane realizes that your video file player doesn't need its own social network.
- joshspankit 5y agoThis is what I call “cashing out the social capital”. I don’t know if I’d call it a business model, but it’s certainly something that many modern businesses do.
- shrimp_emoji 5y agoAh, so that's what Blizzard/Bethesda have been doing. :D
- joshspankit 5y agoYes exactly
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoAnd EA
- amacbride 5y agoand Dropbox
- causality0 5y agoI will never forgive Dropbox. I spent a decade evangelizing them as the way to do cloud file storage to all the tech-illiterate people in my life and then Dropbox decided to limit free accounts to three devices. The sheer number of pissed-off and/or confused phone calls I got from all of those people was enough to make me wish eternal suffering upon the Dropbox executives.
- joshspankit 5y agoThat is basically the dictionary definition of cashing out social capital: be so good that people evangelize your brand, then start aggressively putting profit first once you reach a critical mass of public awareness.
- bayindirh 5y agoI think they didn't cash-out on social capital. They grew, and became "enterprise first". The recipe is to limit free services and increase the price of paid service, so only big customers and serious users get attracted to you. Trello did the same thing. They killed their single-user friendly features and moved to enterprise first, gouging serious solo users in the process. I'm still subscribed to both, but I'm not as happy as before.
- temp8964 5y agoI stopped paying for Evernote two years ago. I guess the more individual customers leave, the more it makes the management depending on business users, so the less they care about individual customers.
- dehrmann 5y agoThe challenge is every PM at the company thinks they can see a step function increase in engagement, retention, etc. if they just add the right features.
- lifeplusplus 5y agoThis! Can't get that promotion until your feature that somehow increases some kpi somewhere in short term.. this why lot of sites go through complete redesign when everything is already working
- bayindirh 5y agoI don't think so. Yes, the "first" Evernote had great features, but it was all over the place. No clients had the same set of features, and web side was even worse. When they ditched everything and rebuilt all clients from the same base, they've lost some of the cool features, but I find it much easier to use and rely on. Only after that point I bought a subscription, fully went into it, and currently building my knowledge base inside it, and collaborating on some stuff. Simpler is not always worse. Yes, the old Evernote was a "road warrior's utopia", but the current incarnation works much better on a cross-platform perspective, and I'm a happy camper.