Similarly in software there are definite advantages to having a dedicated steward for a given type of data, but it's much better if there is some way to take your data back should you decide to put it elsewhere. If the fund I owned changed their prospectus and decided to start active management, or significantly increased their management fee, or whatever, I could pull my money out and invest it elsewhere. I'm ok with that situation because I understand and accept the logic of indexing. The only data I let websites or applications own is data I’d be OK with losing.Īctually I'd say a large percentage of people would be very well served by a globally diversified index fund for all their equity holdings.Īnd perhaps the analogy is still useful. It seems like a clear choice to me: if the data is anything I value, I must have direct access to it, regardless of what tools I use to manipulate it. Or, most likely of all, the company could start publishing buggier and buggier updates, and you’ll have no choice but to use buggier and buggier software. If the company kills a feature, you have to do without it. If the product is discontinued, the same.
If the company goes under, your application can rot to unusability. If there’s a bug, your data can disappear.
But if the application owns your data-if it stores it behind the scenes and never exposes it to you directly-then your data is exactly as fragile as that application. If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you please with tools of your choosing. I sound like a cynic when I say this, but the root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application.
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