Evernote Strategy

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I really think Evernote is missing the boat, and I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but I normally charge for consulting, and you're getting it free - so no polish.

The main features of Evernote are related to its ability to act as a data collection point which is accessible from multiple machines.  It was really great 5 years ago, and held promise.  Alas, the company is only moving horizontally, and failing to exploit what the ability to collect data means.  Sharing data with multiple machines is no longer special.  The cloud makes that possible and cheap.  So what do you do with this data?  Well in the case of dropbox, the format of the data is legacy files and folders, so what you do with it depends on the application you apply to it.  Very simple.  Evernote does not have that ability.  (it could, but that might be a little too out there for management at this point).

So what you can do with your data in Evernote is limited to the client, and that's a serious problem if your client isn't keeping up, and its not.

Yes, you have some neat objects knit together - but it won't take Dropbox or a third party to figure out how to do that in the file system.  Microsoft has already started with the obvious (like comments in NTFS that you can attach to your files, but this is a baby step.

Here are the very simplistic things Evernote just fails at:

There is no time control.  Reminders are nice, but people use calendars, not reminders, and if you are sitting there with all of your data at your command, exactly what are you planning to do with it and when?  What notes are required for that event?  What files?  There's room for a whole new paradigm here if you put your thinking caps on, and Evernote already has a foundation.  Data, files, links, annotation,.....

Templates are another feature that needs more integration.  Yes, templates save typing and that was great in 1950.  This is not 1950.  Think about it.

Clearly One Note is a great platform that will do most of what Evernote does - and I've got hundreds of hours with it, and some huge notebooks, but Microsoft's own narcissism stops them from ripping the market apart - they know ***** about networking, most of their developers don't speak English, and they think that there server products are "great", which everyone knows is not true.  If you use their cloud services, create an empty notebook, and sync it, you can waste 30 minutes due to performance issues.  Add a few hundred megabytes and you won't sync for days.  Completely unacceptable, BUT what if they fix it?

Then Evernote will be history, and that's pretty scary.  Microsoft already owns the desktop, as you know, and even though they keep messing it up, eventually an unlimited number of monkeys are going to get it right, so the question is what does Evernote do to get ready in case that happens, and perhaps lead the way toward integration.

You've got to build vertically.

You need to own the time dimension.  You need to build on the project paradigm.  You need to work the dataset angle.  This is what humans do.

OK, times up.  Got to go.

/Len

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[DTLow 5,736]

5 minutes ago, umina said:

Well in the case of dropbox, the format of the data is legacy files and folders, so what you do with it depends on the application you apply to it.  Very simple.  Evernote does not have that ability.  (it could, but that might be a little too out there for management at this point).

As you stated, Evernote does not have a folder filing methodology - this was by design from day 1
It works for me, but I know it absolutlely confuses some people.
Not sure what you mean about files - I have files attached to notes

>>Templates are another feature that needs more integration.  Yes, templates save typing and that was great in 1950.  This is not 1950.  Think about it.

Evernote has completely ignored the template requirement.  I implemented my own process via AppleScript

>>Then Evernote will be history, and that's pretty scary.

Not scary, but I'll be sad.

I think you're right.  The features that made Evernote unique, are being replicated by various companies.
And these other companies can supply this for free which makes it hard to compete.