Evernote: the old cloud

[Tamagotchi 46]

The strength of Evernote was that it was the old cloud. You could dump all your data in one place and get access to it on the move, from any device, independent of the ecosystem and hardware. 

The ubiquity of the cloud has made this redundant. Sure it works best if we choose an ecosystem (Apple, Microsoft or Google) and cheapest when we use fewer services more. 

With Evernote, you have one user interface and many data sources, but we are then limited to the functionality that Evernote provides, which has stagnated since 2018 - hardly changed. 

The alternate option is to choose the cloud and then find apps that work well with it. The obvious choice is those that make that come with that ecosystem. Apple, Microsoft or Google produce many good apps that work seamlessly with their cloud service. 

Examples:

• Microsoft Office365 works seamlessly across all devices and scales to different screen sizes and includes a full range of apps. Cloud space is cheap with Terrabytes of data included in the Office365 annual subscription. 
• Adobe has created something similar for the creatives. Adobe is too expensive for the occasional use but heavy user would see an advantage in an effort to create a seamless cloud environment with content creation apps. 

The bugbear with Evernote is what do I do with my data. Many startups have built a good app that does one thing well. They have seen a need and produced an app for that need. Some apps are related to an ecosystem but many are not.  

Take for example project management. There is so much choice and solutions for every segment and scale. Finding the best option is the challenge. Similar to other fields of activity, service providers offer a way of doing that specific activity better online. One comment in this forum related to a professional mail service that better-suited mails in volume business model than consumer-grade services. 

So I come back to the question. What does Evernote do well? The information available everywhere is not a unique selling point. The CEO promised that he wanted Evernote to do something with data. It is still not clear to me after 9 months what that vision is. Evernote really should have work it out by now, what they want to do well. 

In the meantime, Evernote broke the tag search. That was the key selling point for Evernote. That I could have a massive database of things that I had no chance of remembering. With a few tags and incremental adjustments including and excluding tags, I could narrow thousands down to a handful, within less than a minute. This was a wonder. 

Without search, data is useless. For a specific task, w will find something that is likely to serve, some better than others. There is a solution, should we define the problem sufficiently.  

Evernote will have to choose a niche, a segment and do that very well. What does the green elephant stand for now?

[gazumped 11,667]

Didn't know tag search was broke...

[DTLow 5,736]

38 minutes ago, Tamagotchi said:

The strength of Evernote was that it was the old cloud.

I don't think "the cloud" has changed; It continues to be where Evernote store the master version of our data   
Access to our data via the web platform has improved

I access my data with a Mac and iPad (IOS)    
I use the tag feature to organize my data; text search is also useful

>> ...  functionality that Evernote provides, which has stagnated since 2018 - hardly changed. 

I'm using Evernote's Legacy product but there's work-in-progress on the v10 product   
There's development in tasks functionality