Evernote CEO promises improved software quality, stability, and simplicity in 2014
On Software Quality and Building a Better Evernote in 2014 — I got the wrong sort of birthday present yesterday: a sincerely-written post by Jason Kincaid lamenting a perceived decline in the quality of Evernote software over the past few months.
Context & Ripple Effects
The response comes one day after Jason Kincaid published his critique of Evernote as a bug-ridden product despite relying on it for nearly seven thousand notes — the kind of complaint that lands hardest because it comes from a committed user, not a drive-by reviewer. Phil Libin answered publicly within 24 hours, promising improved quality, stability, and simplicity across 2014.
The pledge reads as a course correction against the company's own 2013 cadence: Reminders launched in May, Skitch annotation and Related Notes arrived on iPhone and iPad by July, version 5 of the Windows desktop shipped in September, and the 3M Post-it digitization partnership followed that month. Each launch added surface area; the CEO's post concedes the foundation under it had frayed. The story traveled unusually wide for an internal mea culpa, picked up by Computerworld, BBC, The Verge, TechCrunch, Engadget and others.
First-order effects
- Evernote's engineering priorities for 2014 shift from the feature-launch rhythm of 2013 — Reminders, Skitch support, the Post-it integration, Windows version 5 — toward stability and simplicity, a direct concession that recent releases degraded the core product.
- Critics like Kincaid gain a public benchmark: the CEO has now committed in writing to specific quality improvements, giving power users a yardstick against which every subsequent release gets measured.
Second-order effects
- A public quality pledge raises the cost of the next buggy release — the same outlets that amplified the critique are positioned to audit whether 2014's updates actually deliver stability, turning routine changelogs into accountability checkpoints.
- Rivals in note-taking and personal archiving inherit an opening to compete on reliability rather than feature count, pressuring the whole category to slow its launch cadence or match Evernote's stated focus.
Third-order effects
- If the episode becomes a template, fast-scaling consumer software companies will face a predictable cycle: feature velocity through growth phases, then a visible quality reckoning once the committed-user base accumulates enough data and history to notice decay.
- It also signals that a founder-CEO answering individual critiques directly — rather than through support channels — is becoming the expected crisis playbook for consumer cloud services whose value depends on years of accumulated user data.
The trend: Consumer productivity services built on long-lived user data are entering a phase where reliability and trust, not feature velocity, become the competitive axis — with public CEO commitments serving as the pivot point.