Evernote’s 5% problem offers a cautionary lesson to tech companies
The 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.