Evernote has been the focus of even more criticism lately with Josh Dickson’s article titled “Evernote, the First Dead Unicorn” being shared fairly widely (also read his follow-up post).
I have had my frustrations with Evernote in the past and I’ve shared many on this blog. It works really well, when it works but, when it doesn’t, it is incredibly frustrating. Just the same, I haven’t found a replacement for Evernote that does what I do with Evernote without adding a lot more administrative overhead to my workflows (the closest I’ve come is probably a combination of Google Drive/Keep – especially with the new iOS apps – Instapaper and Pinboard).
It is encouraging to see news coming out of Evernote in the last few days; first about planned updates to the apps to improve the notes and writing experience and, just yesterday, a post by the new CEO, Chris O’Neill, who wrote about a little restructuring, Evernote’s strong paid subscriptions business and this nugget:
Evernote’s strength is in its core: notes, sync, and search
This may just be me but I am hoping this signals a return to the fundamentals and Evernote removing unpopular features like Evernote’s Work Chat feature. I don’t think that feature proved to be quite as popular as Evernote hoped. There are so many other great alternatives and Work Chat would only really be compelling if you and your colleagues did absolutely everything in Evernote.
I’d like to see Work Chat removed and those core features improved. I have been using Evernote for over 5 years and I have a lot of stuff (almost 23 000 mixed media notes) in Evernote which I reference and add to daily. Hopefully, rumours of Evernote’s slow death are greatly exaggerated and this promise of a more focused Evernote will be realised.
Image credit: Evernote HQ Office by Yusuke Kawasaki, licensed CC BY 2.0