Sad state of Evernote

Posted by Anthony
Dec 6, 2022 at 03:32 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>BTW, I am interested in counterpoints… where the acquisition of an established app ended up improving the service for the users. Any thoughts?

Examples are reactive materials: difficult to find and to manage. But let me try.
A speculation first. Acquisitions occur in at least two ways, i.e. in two directions. Either because the market of that app is growing, or because it is shrinking. The future is uncertain though, so it is not always possible to ascertain which case is which. Apart this “small” identification problem, the prospects of the former case seems usually better than the latter.
Examples:
Let me start with a classic outliner: MindManager. It seems still in relatively good health (at least for the corporate market).
It was created in the 1990s, then it was sold, in its infancy, by its inventor, Mike Jetter. At the beginning of 2000 MM XP was very good for personal use in my opinion. Then Corel acquired Mindjet (MM’s software house) in 2016: I guess corporate users did not complain.

Another similar example in the knowledge domain maybe Endnote, created in 1989. It has changed several time hands. But it seems still an established biblio-app. I shall not venture in the social media, but the temptation of mentioning Instagram and Wathsapp (acquired by Facebook), or Skype acquired in 2011 by Microsoft could be also used as examples of acquisition that did not ruin what they bought.

A good - and mixed - example that illustrates how liquid is the software landscape on this matter, comes from Adobe acquiring Macromedia in 2005: some established apps indeed died (Freehand). However, some others survived and grew so to became standard, such as Dreamweaver.