For the owners/shareholders of that particular 1-2 person company, do they wish it had stayed one, or are they glad it didn't?

I have to hope that the original owners really wanted to make the best product possible and lost their heads with the power to create that they thought the investments would bring.

That's may even be fine for some bits of data. But, for anything I want access to long-term, I just can't trust SaaS start-ups anymore. Very few acquisitions end up with a favorable outcome for the customers. Sometimes the service gets unceremoniously shut down. In other cases the app gets folded in to some other product the parent company owns. In yet others the product suffers as the parent company tries to squeeze what it can from the existing consumer base.

I have no real interest in trying to scrape my data out of a vault so I can recreate it elsewhere. Increasingly, I limit my choices to established players with a history of long-term product support (e.g., Apple or Microsoft, but not Google) or OSS. I'm sure in the short-term I'm missing out on new functionality that could increase my productivity, but I don't like the anxiety of knowing I could lose all my data in an instant and so I don't truly engage with such products. My primary concern is no longer than the company will go out of business but rather that they'll try to shoehorn a growth model that doesn't make sense for the core product so they can then sell and sail off into the sunset.

Obsidian is an interesting case where's it's not an established company and it's not OSS, but they've made it possible for you to ensure long-term access to your data. If needed, there could be an OSS-equivalent of Obsidian to read those files. But, I'm happy to just pay them for a good product. If they were to have a big exit, that's great for them and I don't think I'd be impacted very much.

The trend in software has been a move to walled gardens and there's been strong adoption there, so I don't think my mindset on the topic is a prevailing opinion. But, I have noticed family members and such have grown increasingly tired of service shutdowns from acquisitions. Expensive devices become bricks. Important data goes away. Etc.

Obsidian: also worth looking at DEVONthink for similar reasons, but with the advantage that you have a choice of sync services including running your own. The database is open, but a risk point is that it uses RTFD for notes with graphics. That's not supported off the Apple platform, but there are similar risks with any method of storing notes with graphics.

A common tactic now is to have this idea of lock-in. That if you don't continue to use said service you loose everything. This forces you into that subscription and makes it extremely hard to transfer and move.

I have seen many apps that lock data export behind enterprise subscriptions - that have no pricing and only "contact us".

I do think there are times it may make sense to have some unique file format (maybe your app does something special and needs that format) but there should always be a way to get that data into something more standard. Whether that's a text file, a CSV file or something else.

Are Evernote files just plain "text files"?

But they should be just text files with pointers to non-text things.

Creating a proprietary format just because is an unnecessary complexity and cost.

I used Evernote for 5-10 years and had thousands of notes. I had maybe 10-20 photographs or diagrams mixed in, but mostly it was text.

Not sure how common my use is, but they kept adding stuff I didn’t want. And it’s now a “free” feature in Apple notes, onenote and countless others.

I think the difference is that Microsoft and Apple are just trying to find efficient ways to store data in their cloud storage. Evernote was trying to find ways to make customers pay for note taking.

When it comes to pure “notes” I find either Google Keep or Apple Notes are good enough and work with less effort on my part so that’s where most of my scribbles go.

I see what you mean. But at the same time I do have the brainpower to simply remember to save my notes into the "notes" folder, which I then sync into some cloud storage.

Or even just use Google Keep. I'm fine pasting links, copying pictures, and jotting quick notes down. I didn't necessarily need inking support on my end. Condolances to those who did, as well as other features like audio and others I can't remember off the top of my head.

This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these companies struggle because the value proposition simply isn't there for what they're offering.

Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No. But someone has to pay back the billions spent on useless corporate bloat and thousands of employees.

At one level I shouldn't care. The VCs burn the money, the users make a bad choice to rely on something that will inevitably disappear when the profit-seeking crunch comes, not my problem.

But it's unfortunately for all of us because all this human energy (from users, developers) that gets wasted over and over on doomed-to-fail proprietary solutions could be so much better spent on developing, using and promoting open source distributed solutions that can stand the test of time.

To be fair, it’s only “an ordering system” if you look purely at pick-up ordering. For deliveries, these apps are two-sided real-time resource schedulers (allocating a driver to N orders they can efficiently deliver through pickups and drop offs on a single precalculated connecting route to optimize both time and fuel consumption.) The value is in the backend software, as the very same backend software should be reusable for e.g. routing driverless taxis.

Looking at problems naively it looks simple but it's -really- not that simple if you want it to do WELL.

While I agree with the sentiment, it is worth noting that the 30% helps cover the delivery-person’s cut. Ideally, there should be a fixed cost courier charge, but that’s tangential to the point here.

Especially for double-sided markets like food delivery where you have a chicken and egg problem - why providers sign up when there aren’t users and why would users sign up when there aren’t any providers.

That’s a human problem, not a technical one, and is the expensive bit.

You are just looking at the tip of the iceberg. Being essentially a CRUD app doesn’t mean it is less complex than other software. This is similar to saying “Facebook is just a web site, I could make that over a weekend.”