Evernote is a new take on selling software
After using Evernote for more than 10 years, I've upgraded to Premium shortly before taking off on a 13-hour flight. Up until now, absence of offline search didn't bother me much. Even though I am a huge fan of Evernote, paying for something that I don't truly need just didn't feel right. I was mostly using it for writing down thoughts anyway. But recently I started browsing through my older notes a lot, revisiting ideas and connecting the dots. A long flight is a perfect setting for such an activity, so I hit "subscribe".
Right away, something unexpected happened. The app blinked, and boom – it became fast. How come?! I kind of got used to its slowness, but I always thought there was some technical reason for that. And if it's already built, then why not give the new fast UI to free users as well? That's unfair, I thought.
Then I thought again. This is actually brilliant! I instantly felt that I paid for something tangible. Not strictly required, but beautifully crafted. A real thing. How many physical objects do we regularly buy just because we want to have them, not because we need them? The entire industry of luxury goods caters for that timeless demand.
But in software, such a market doesn't exist yet. Apps don't have a concept of "top shelf" or "budget-friendly", unlike watches, cars, appliances, furniture, virtually anything. Very few people would buy a cheap watch that "just shows the time", and yet an app asking more money for slicker user experience sounds quite strange.
This will change, and is already changing. Evernote is of course not about premium UX. It’s original idea of "extended brain" today makes more sense than ever. But it is also clear that making money off a note-taking app as a business is quite a challenge. With core features being essentially text editing and content capture, it is borderline donationware. My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that in pursuit of recurring revenue which any company needs sooner or later they’ve tried all conventional ways, and none of them worked. So they went unorthodox and discovered this subtle concept of upgrade tangibility.
Software industry is young. So young in fact that equivalents of the most basic concepts from other industries sometimes simply do not exist. In a parallel with electrical engineering, today we are somewhere around AC / DC debate. Wall sockets? Power grid? Batteries? All that is yet to be invented.
