What confuses me about products like Evernote and other CRUD services is - it's just a notebook app. How is it truly worthy of the army of coders, or the millions or billions in valuation that similar CRUD acquires?
It feels like there is a tendency of projects like this to grow too far, too fast, until they fail - dollar signs in their eyes obscuring a reasonable vision of their scale and potential, which is far more modest than they realise.
But then again, the ones that remain reasonable don't get in the news I suppose.
In this case Evernote is far more than just CRUD and you can see that by comparing it to the CRUD self-hosted alternatives which exist and have sub-par syncing, editing, organization, and indexing. For all it's flaws, which caused them to lose me as a customer, it's definitely more complex than it appears at first glance.
Evernote had a lot of odd tech bits in it, it wasn't just a CRUD app. At one point you could take a picture of a beer bottle and it would OCR the label for you automatically. I'm sympathetic to your argument (since that's how Pinboard competitors have died) but Evernote was a universe of its own.
And consider this: performing OCR on product labels is nothing like performing OCR on a neatly typed A4 paper that has been scanned. It is an enormously difficult feat that probably required at least a small team to accomplish.
I haven’t used Evernote to know enough, but at a 10,000 foot level, how trivial is it to scale any CRUD application to millions of customers? Considering scaling up and out, individual users, collaboration (if that’s a feature, I dunno), persistence and durability, i18n, personalization (if that exists in Evernote), and whatever metrics or information it captures about its users that might be sold to third parties.
Isn’t Google Docs CRUD to some extent? Any idea how much it is worth or even how many people support Google Docs?
Anyway, I’m not debating whether Evernote is actually worth whatever is it’s current valuation. I don’t agree with how can something be worth so much because its just CRUD.
It feels like there is a tendency of projects like this to grow too far, too fast, until they fail - dollar signs in their eyes obscuring a reasonable vision of their scale and potential, which is far more modest than they realise.
But then again, the ones that remain reasonable don't get in the news I suppose.