(Archived) Bad timing - strategic planning failure

[Extropy 68]

I think Evernote should have a critical look at the strategic planning that led to December 2012, a month in which at least this user has been disappointed.

Just on the surface, the roll-out of a major UI revamp in parallel with an attack on a whole new market segment (Evernote Business) might be considered ambitious - certainly optimistic. Coupled with the disappointing results of an extremely short beta period for Evernote 5.0 - a major rework - I would not be surprised to find others like myself withdrawing a bit from the enthusiasm and expectations I have had for the last three years as a premium customer.

Two months ago, I was poised to gobble up Evernote Business and evangelise it throughout my company. I am still keenly interested in doing so, but I cannot justify the $500/month that it would cost. For $6,000/year, I get an ERP system. Our HR system costs about the same. These are mission critical applications that handle our most sensitive and important information. I had high hopes that Evernote would be able to become our company knowledge base, entrusted with all the information that is not handled by our line operational systems. I knew it would be an expense, but I am surprised to see it costing about the same as one of those mission critical systems.

If the platform clients were brilliantly effective, and the syncing was _absolutely_ perfect, I might be nudged toward paying the price. With the current iOS and Mac clients, however, I am backing away carefully. The Mac client shows signs of improvement and I suppose another two months of the "beta" we production users are currently experiencing will bring it back up to a reasonable standard. The iOS client, however, is not showing similar signs of being on a fast track to improvement. To be honest, it needs a lot of work to become production quality again (see my other posts on this).

Sadly, the bad execution of the UI revamp and the high price will keep me in "wait and see" mode. In addition to the lessons learned from the botched execution of this UI deployment, I will also be looking for signs that this kind of strategic mistake will not be repeated.

I can roll with the punches for my personal tools, but when these tools run my business, I have other considerations to deal with.

[Extropy 68]

After reflecting on the above for a day, I still love Evernote, and I hope you fix it soon!