The Future of Evernote

[Don Dz 165]

I wonder what plans do the owners of Evernote have for the continued existence of the service after they retire, and perhaps how close they are to retirement.  I suppose they can leave the running of the company to others while they enjoy their retirement, but I fear the service will die with them (or worse, sell it to Microsoft). 

Their partnership with Google leads me to suspect Google might eventually buy them out, not something I feel very comfortable with (I think the service is currently being run through Google's servers, if I am not mistaken).

On the other hand, I am not that young myself, hopefully I will die before Evernote does.

Sorry if i sound too morbid, my children do complain about that sometimes.  ?

[gazumped 12,031]

As far as I know "the owners of Evernote" include (presumably) creator Stepan Pachikov,  plus DoCoMo Capital,  Morgenthaler Ventures and Sequoia Capital (amongst -possibly- many others).  It's hosted by Google servers.  I don't think there's too much of a risk that the servers will get switched off anytime soon.  Even if they were,  I have local backups which could be used to extract and migrate my notes. 

No doubt every other note-taking app would be after their own share of Evernote's former users,  and would be developing their own migration software (a few have that sort of app already) to import my database.

I'm feeling reasonably secure...

[DTLow 5,744]

17 minutes ago, Don Dz said:

On the other hand, I am not that young myself, hopefully I will die before Evernote does.

Just in case that doesn't work out, I'm confident it's an easy 30 minute export and my data is available for my use.

In fact, I run that export weekly as part of backups.

[Don Dz 165]

5 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Just in case that doesn't work out, I'm confident it's an easy 30 minute export and my data is available for my use.

I picked up that tip before from one of your posts, thanks.

But you probably already know that it is nearly impossible to play with your Evernote data without having an urge to edit it or create more.   Which doesn't work well in a web browser.

[DTLow 5,744]

1 hour ago, Don Dz said:

But you probably already know that it is nearly impossible to play with your Evernote data without having an urge to edit it or create more. 

My backup export is html format.  I can work in this format.

 I have text editors, but editing is a pain.  I'd look for a wysiwyg editor.

[Don Dz 165]

22 minutes ago, gazumped said:

No doubt every other note-taking app would be after their own share of Evernote's former users,  and would be developing their own migration software (a few have that sort of app already) to import my database.

Yes, I exported all my data to OneNote, fully intending to keep both databases running while I considered my options.  Never thought I would end up ditching OneNote entirely (super slow and unstable).

[gazumped 12,031]

There's some interesting-looking options around,  but they're in Beta or Alpha at the moment - a long way from viable alternatives.

[Don Dz 165]

40 minutes ago, gazumped said:

There's some interesting-looking options around,  but they're in Beta or Alpha at the moment - a long way from viable alternatives.

Actually, I just remembered something about exporting:  I was a very early adopter of Evernote (version 1 and 2 before cloud services), but never took Evernote seriously until about 3 years ago, primarily because (aside from my distrust of the cloud) Evernote never took seriously the idea of attracting us Palm users looking around during the demise of the Palm company.

Even though there were some third party solutions created at the time (which haven't worked for years because of updates), this abandonment, which also happened with users of several other software platforms and devices, left me with the strong impression you cannot really trust your data to the future whims of your current providers or the support of companies that may or may not decide it is worth their while to support dying technologies.

Hence my trying to feel the current pulse of things, so to speak.

I even taught myself some programming and scripting languages to try to tackle some of the many serious issues in data conversion and transfer, but gave up when the xml format became standard for data sharing, too hard for an amateur programmer like myself.

[gazumped 12,031]

If it's any consolation,  I'd be confident that if Evernote (or at least us users) ever seemed vulnerable,  every other note-taking software house in the world would 1) try to be the preferred provider who nominally 'takes over' all orphaned accounts - so they could acquire 200M customers in one hit;  or 2) regardless of whoever gets the main gig will have everyone else offering their solution with a rapidly-developed 'import' option to try and steal some from the herd. 

Us users are a valuable commodity (some more than others ) even if the current situation may make you doubtful...