Part of my THE WAY I SEE IT series, where I quick-hit a few topics per week.
Remember Everything. That’s Evernote’s motto… but, is it really? This company seems to have forgotten what it takes to “grow”.
Evernote is a cloud service that allows users to keep track of many things – such as notes, ideas and outlines. It syncs with computers and smartphones via software.
The Evernote service launched in 2008 and took more than a year to reach a million users. They were once “nobodies”. This month they reached a 4 million user-base. (see report)
Evernote Corporation claims its service works with every device – for smartphones that’s primarily done via installed apps. However, earlier this week webOSroundup reported Evernote’s plans to cease development for webOS.
“We’d love to see the WebOS platform succeed at HP, but our resources are limited, so the WebOS client is currently on the “back burner” while we wait to see what happens with the platform.” – Dave Engberg, Evernote
In short, Evernote isn’t interested in catering to a smaller user base, and that includes fixing bugs in an actively-served app from Palm’s catalog.
It’s not that webOS users themselves are being totally ignored. Yesterday webOSroundup ran another article, whereas an Evernote employee said he was passing the complaint to the CEO, who would converse with management. Which… makes me wonder…
How big or small is this company? From the emails, there are at least two regular employees (or reps), a CEO and management team. Perhaps not a goliath, but certainly larger than the majority of app developers. By ignoring user-bases Evernote is telling us the company is either short-staffed or doesn’t want to spend the money on an outside developer.
The way I see it, if Evernote bails out of webOS just to sit, and wait, and see… well, then the webOS community doesn’t need the service. It’s that simple. Hey, there are plenty of competing services and it’s no secret that more stellar cloud services are being developed. If Evernote wants let its competition grab a bigger piece of the pie, that’s Evernote’s business. If the company’s not willing to take the risk on a great platform – that definitely has potential – why should users take the risk on its cloud services?
While this may make sense to companies vying only for the largest group of potential users, Evernote shouldn’t ignore smaller groups, comprised of truly dedicated users who tend to be more vocal with their support of a product. To ignore those users is to forget from whence Evernote came.
