Rumors of Evernote’s demise have been greatly exaggerated

Software
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Late last year, Evernote was going through a period of change that went all the way to the CEO’s office.

At that time many tech reviewers and YouTubers managed to stir up quite a frenzy among Evernote users. Much was being written and republished over and over questioning whether Evernote was about to close down. Panicked users were scrambling to find workable alternatives for, sometimes, a decade or more of information stored neatly in what many view as the grand daddy of note taking and storage services.

This is one man’s opinion based on the activity and follow-through at Evernote since Ian Small has taken over as CEO.

He hit the ground running…full of enthusiasm and eager to bring lots of new features to Evernote. Unfortunately, after getting to know the current situation at the company during his first two months in his new position he became much more aware of the reality that the current Evernote platforms were tired, inconsistent and had been largely abandoned by previous management and the back-end systems were inferior to support a 24/7, always available service such as Evernote.

Not to be discouraged or swayed from his original plan, he realized the first step would have to be getting the basic service consistent across all platforms and shoring up the supporting infrastructure to make sure the service could be delivered reliably.

In his YouTube video laying out his plans to accomplish these goals in 2019, he was very clear that this would be a year of rebuilding the basic service into something we would all be proud to use. And to that end, he has delivered on every single point.

Once he gets the basic service back to a consistent and stable experience across all platforms, we will begin to see the newer and more innovative features roll out…hopefully as early as 2020.

So for all of you who have frantically been looking for an Evernote replacement service because you think they may “be in trouble”…rest easy. The service is going nowhere. The new management team is all on-board with the idea of returning Evernote to its former glory.

If you want to see some of the specific issues they are currently working on, check out the YouTube series “Evernote: Behind the Scenes”.

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I completely agree! Not only is he telling us, the users, about making updates/improvements, he’s showing us. The videos are fantastic and am thrilled at all of the workflow and parity between the platforms going on.

#evernote has been my everything for a long time now. I’m happy to pay for the subscription based all of the use I get out of it.

I believe the future of the platform is bright indeed.

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Not an Evernote user but glad to see it’s not irreparably doomed. Too many people depend on it.

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Interesting videos. Thanks for the heads up. They don’t have a lot a views – minuscule compared to the subscriber base – which is usually quoted as being well into the millions. I would think the company might consider a better way to get in touch with subscribers.

My premium renewal came and went recently and I decided this is the last year. Might still be. Getting out of Evernote is still a pain for a library as large as mine.

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I was an Evernote user probably since day one of their normal service. Too many mistakes, too many issues, too many “we’ll do better next time” and too many apologies later…

I’ve moved on. And will never look back.
I hope other users find the reliable service they want, but I’ve been stung too often.

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I do understand your feelings and misgivings about all of the empty promises that were made and never fulfilled.

Honestly, I wasn’t all that sure that Ian was going to really fulfill his promises or if that was just the enthusiastic introduction required by a new CEO to his company and subscribers.

I’m delighted to see that he is actually fulfilling the promises he made…and if anything, he may “over deliver” the results!

That is quite a breath of fresh air in this day and age when far too many people “over promise” and “under deliver”! Maybe some people still have integrity and a strong work ethic.

Good for Ian…good for Evernote…and good for all of us…the Evernote users!

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That is a very real consideration that I don’t believe many people give the proper attention to. When you have years of your digital life stored within any one service, it takes an extraordinary reason to make a change.

You may be talking about days…or even weeks of work to move your data from one service to another. Before beginning any such undertaking a user needs to be sure they have very thoroughly tested the service they are considering, read all of the terms of service and understand any potential financial commitment they may be engaging in.

The more data you have stored with a given cloud service , the more difficult the decision becomes. I love having a paperless lifestyle. However as I need to backup, protect, archive and be able to readily access my electronic information quickly from any device I own, I have to depend on a fairly sophisticated backup and archive procedure that includes off site redundancy.

As the size of my digital asset collection grows, I need an ever more compelling reason to move those assets to different service provider.

I am thrilled with the work I am seeing Ian Small and the Evernote team doing on our behalf to provide us with a first class user experience as Evernote customers!

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I tend to agree with your general sense of hopefulness concerning Evernote.

This is not the first tech company to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and emerge into greener pastures on the other side. Microsoft has been there and, I would argue, Apple is there now as they struggle to find a way back to a degree of public trust and confidence in the quality of their laptop category.

Like it or not, when a tech company looses the public’s trust, it can be a long road back to regain that trust. Evernote spent many years trumpeting their newest innovations only to introduce a redesigned logo.

Like others in this conversation, I have too much invested in Evernote to simply walk away. Because of this, I am compelled to be hopeful. Yet, if Evernote is still talking about platform parity and backend stability upgrades a year from now, then I fear the worst for Evernote.

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I’d like to go back to Evernote. Now, I am floating along with no real rhyme or reason. Mostly Apple Notes and pages documents. If all pans out, it has great potential.

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What is your Evernote replacement? How did you transition away from Evernote?

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It’s not difficult to import from Apple Notes or OneNote. And using IFTTT you can migrate Evernote files to Google Drive, Day One, Dropbox, and more. Lots of info on the web.

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I moved all my notes into Apple notes, and Devonthink. I now use DT for web clipping and Apple notes for most other notes. DT has an import option for Evernote, and that worked fine for me.

Having said this, for my use, Apple notes alone would probably have been fine, especially with iOS13 on the way and the increased options. But, I already had DT for my finance and work reading archive, so that was lucky.

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Maybe I don’t know how to use Evernote. I’ve been using it for more than six years now and don’t remember ever losing anything in it. What is more valuable to me is the Web clipper. Items I discovered years ago appear again when I search for a topic or tag. In general, the search feature seems to work well. I can find bits of notes that I wrote to myself years ago.

I admit that the service seems a bit expensive for my uses: tagging and storing web resources and taking notes. But now that I have 6+ years of my life in the program, it is hard to walk away.

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This thread reads like an Evernote Infomercial… Would be interesting to understand if they’re profitable. If not, what the plan to return to profitability is. I know they had a couple of privacy snafu’s and I guess I’m wondering if they’re looking at “marketing” as a business model. (Note: I’m making a totally baseless assumption that they’re losing both users and money)

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I have been very angry at EN when they messed around with their privacy fail and quit then. However I have watched with much interest those videos and they really give me reason to go back. Kudos to Ian Small and the team.

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The only reason I use Evernote is because of Skitch. Unfortunately, Skitch is very outdated at this moment. I hope they will restore Skitch.

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I was listening to the latest, Macstock episode of the In Touch With iOS podcast, and Dave Hamilton of MacObserver (and the MacGeekGab podcast) and he was complaining bitterly about the slowness of Evernote on iOS if you’ve got a large repository of files, giving the example of trying to access a simple packing list taking 10-15 seconds to load on iOS (while being much faster on the desktop). He said he needed folder sharing and went to Evernote from using Dropbox, but that when Catalina/13 comes out officially he’s going to try out Apple Notes to see if it can replace Evernote, and, if not, he’d probably migrate to OneNote.

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Useful video series. I really hope they are successful. I use Evernote a huge amount and if it failed it would be a significant issue for me.

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My first subscription years ago, and it is my tome of knowledge.

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I can’t justify the pricing for the premium plan just to use one or two of the paid features. The plan (actually plans, they had more than one paid plan for non-business users) used to be reasonable, with useful features. Now I’m just filing my new pdf’s in iCloud Drive, and (slowly) migrating actual ‘notes’ into Apple Notes.