[randomdata]

As far as I am concerned, Evernote's core competency is their scanned document handling. Extracting meaningful information from bitmaps is not exactly an easy problem, but Evernote does it very well. Far better than a lot of other solutions I have looked at. Ultimately you need some CRUD to get the documents into that processing pipeline, but that doesn't mean it is just a CRUD app.

Now, we're maybe not talking cutting edge computer science research here, but I'm skeptical that the average programmer could put the same thing together in reasonable time. The algorithms involved are fairly complex and who knows what they had to discover on their own to achieve the desired results?

[eshvk]

> Now, we're maybe not talking cutting edge computer science research here, but I'm skeptical that the average programmer could put the same thing together in reasonable time. The algorithms involved are fairly complex and who knows what they had to discover on their own to achieve the desired results?

How hard is it going to be for the "average programmer" to a) read a fucking research paper. b) optimize based on aforesaid paper to "achieve the desired results.". After all, every company in the bay who is anyone asks you enough C.S. fundamental questions.

[randomdata]

I think you vastly overestimate the average programmer. Every company in the Bay area asks for CS fundamentals because they think they need a great tech team.