How does a company get so successful with a product so awful?

Evernote CEO Phil Libin has respondedto the scathing criticism of the company made in a blog post by former TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid. A post which ended up making headlines recently. Libin says new versions of all the apps are planned, targeting note editing, navigation, search, sync and collaboration.

He says the company has already started on these, and it now plans to focus on stability, design and simplicity – with many more hires planned to beef up their team.

Libin goes to some length to address the issues surrounding Evernote’s increasingly bloated platform, many of which are around the ecosystem of apps Evernote has built up which has led to a series of issues around bugs.

He says “reading Jason’s article was a painful and frustrating experience because, in the big picture, he’s right.” But, he adds, “We’re going to fix this.”

Specifically, he says that despite huge growth the company needs to “pause for a bit and look in rather than up,” and he promises Evernote’s “central theme” for 2014 will be “constant improvement of the core promise of Evernote.”

He says work on this started a couple of months ago, precipitated by the frustrating roll-out of their iOS 7 version, resulting in “stability problems”.

There are 164 engineers and designers working at Evernote, with 150 assigned to the core software products. He pledges the total number will increase “quite a bit” in 2014, but the proportion will stay the same. He claims that since then they’ve made a lot of progress, and Evernote is “measurably less buggy.”

I have always found Evernote unusable. 

Somehow they have 80 million users willing to put up with stability issues. 

So clearly they're doing something right. 

But man could they use some competition. 

More on Jason Kincaid's anti-Evernote rant:

http://pandawhale.com/post/35047/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elephant

I ended up switching after I tried Zimilate - www.zimilate.com.  You can save almost anything, including web pages, images, files, notes, etc.  I also like the fact that unlike Evernote, you can organize collections of content any way I want, both hierarchically and with tags.  

Zimilate saves the entire webpage to the cloud, including all the images and other assets, so you don’t have to worry about it disappearing. Plus instead of showing random images from the page, Zimilate creates a thumbnail of each saved webpage, which makes it fast and easy to locate content visually.  You can also search the full text of anything you save.

One of my big frustrations with Evenote is I end up reading almost everything on a mobile device and there was no easy way to curate it.  With Zimilate, if you email a link to a webpage from your mobile or tablet, it saves the entire webpage for you, which makes curation simple and easy.  You can also email images and files. If you email a link to evernote, all you get is the link, which means you can’t search for it and if the webpage vanishes into the ether you’re SOL.

Lastly, Zimilate recommends other similar, relevant collections from other users. Instead of bookmarking or following other collections, you just drag and drop them to add them to your own, and then you can browse and search the combined contents.  Worth checking out, I like it much better than evernote.