Evernote bloat

Meanwhile, Evernote has confirmed to TechCrunch that in the past month the company has lost many senior executives, including its CTO Anirban Kundu, CFO Vincent Toolan, CPO Erik Wrobel and head of HR Michelle Wagner.

Evernote has been my web clipper for several years. It fills the gap between my online reading and writing. I use it from multiple devices and it works very well. 

However, it costs far too much for the way I use it. It is a subscription service for $70 a year. This is just too much for me to pay for an activity I could probably do in a dozen different ways if I made the effort to switch. 

Evernote has had poor guidance. Perhaps it was run by engineers who delighted in what they could make the service do without bothering to understand what most users wanted it to do. Perhaps the decision makers set the price on the capabilities of the service without bothering to understand that few individuals use most of the features. Feature bloat has been the ruin of many software products. Perhaps the decision makers just didn’t care. 

I am guessing they care now. They have been forced to reduce the price of Evernote and many of the big money executives are gone. 

This happens over and over again. There used to be multiple levels of web design and imaging manipulation software from several companies and these companies have dropped the less expensive and less capable product from their offerings. The problem was that most folks could do everything they wanted to do with the less expensive product. 

I must be missing something in the repeated failure of this approach. I see the problem as the difficulty companies have in creating an additional useful product and pricing the value of an existing product in line with the benefit delivered. 

Forty dollars is closer to the actual value I would put on Evernote. I would price the annual fee at $25, but I suppose the company will try $40 until too many folks move on. 

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