I’ve been an Evernote user almost since launch, it turns out - for about half of that time fully-paid. I’ve embraced almost all the missteps - moleskine notebooks, Food, Hello, Skitch (but not the lifestyle merchandise). At the end of the day it is a reliable, versatile capture and retrieve system for lots of different types of info including meeting notes, scanned docs and research.
I’ve tried to leave many times for onenote and always come back because onenote is a think film of gloss over a very incomplete and unreliable platform, relatively speaking (no drag and drop in OSX or iOS? Wtf?). I still pay for EN even with a subscription to office 365 and an all-Apple workflow.
This post feels a bit reactionary. I agree that Evernote is clearly in need of refocusing; not unusual at this point in a company’s lifecycle I guess, and people have been talking about ‘the first dead unicorn’ for a couple of years.
At the same time, having lived through more than one, a 15% headcount reduction is not that dramatic or extraordinary (in the macro - for the 15% it is, of course).
The leadership change is more concerning and I think it will signal a major change in strategy for EN. I imagine a continuing refocus on business accounts, which will make me sad.
Whatever happens to Evernote, it won’t disappear with our data overnight. It’s pretty much inconceivable that the service will be shuttered without months of warning for people to download and export/migrate their data. One thing that keeps me with Evernote is its ability to share its data with other apps (you can migrate everything to onenote in three clicks, drag whole notebooks to Apple notes etc). If the time comes, we’ll have plenty of warning. ‘Get out while you still can’ feels a bit sensationalist at this point.
