Short attention span kills you

Do, or do not. There is no try. The old wisdom has lots of truth in it.

In IT, the examples are everywhere. Out of the big companies, Google is one of the most visible example of what I'm talking about today.

I am a heavy user of Evernote. It's a note-taking application spanned to catch your audio memos, pictures, whatever have you, and it's maintained by its own company. The company's sole purpose is to keep Evernote alive and breathing. It's been around for a very long time now, and if you're willing to pay, for some money you'll get more space for your notes, better business functionality, whatever.

Then there's the relatively recently launched Google Keep. Now, as a private user, or a business user, WHY should I start using you, or more importantly, trust you to be around in two years?

Google has the tendency to silently kill off all kinds of ideas they try around and consider not catching enough thrust. Google Buzz, Google Wave, various IM platforms, various social media attempts...

Now, I value my data. Whatever I enter to some service, I want it to stay there without worrying that I need to get it migrated to some other place because the original service provider lost interest to their service.

It's not Google I'm solely talking about here, but it's the easy target to point on, as they are so big. For the search / e-mail / Google Drive / YouTube purposes I trust on them. But that's about it. Even with their mobile ecosystem they seem to carry that hurtingly short attention span. I want both the phone and its operating system to be supported for longer than 6-18 months. Apple is not perfect in that respect, but it's much better as iPhone revisions several versions back are still supported with the latest iOS.

Companies. If you want to keep me as a customer, or lure me to try out some of your new products, please first grow a brand which convinces me for your service to be around later as well, and not being one of those "Will this stick?" attempts.