In this sense I mean maintain as a business not necessarily as software. E.g pivoting from growth to efficiency in the business sense.
If you increase your price as substantially as they did, you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting. It's not clear they have been successful in this yet, losing market share to other competitors.
That is they aren't actively trying to compete and take in new users, but stem the flow and increase revenue from their existing customer base who find exporting their data hard.
We've seen this before with lotus notes and other software and we will see it again.
Evernote was bleeding way before they have been bought by Bending Spoons. They were trying to find their way around the market, and Notion hit them like a train.
Considering the features they have added and polished, I can't say they're not trying to add new users. With their pricing strategy, they moved up tiers. They were looking like bargain bin software, but with the new price, they are not. They pulled a Chivas Regal with that move.
They are one of the companies which use AI in a saner way, and inherit a powerful foundation, and they didn't kill any integrations or export options.
The .enex format is still the best export format for these kinds of tools, from my experience.
If you look at their changelogs, you can see that this is not a "let's optimize and extort" operation. They have recreated the tool, and listen user feedback intently.
As I said, I'm not an active Evernote user anymore, so I have no skin in their game. I just want a tool I depended this long to survive in a good shape.
> find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it
> you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting
You’re shifting the goalposts. Either they’re doing the bare minimum to maintain it, or they’re improving it with new features. And that too improving it with enough new features to justify a higher price.
And honestly, neither of these are bad things because none of their products have strong lock ins. Either they’re maintaining a service that was otherwise failing and therefore keeping existing users satisfied, or they’re growing and improving it.
Software is hard, so whether they’re successful or not remains to be seen. And turnaround stories almost never happen in software so they’re taking on an even harder job, but so far there’s little evidence that they’re been user hostile.