note to senior management:
the failure to provide selective sync is a poison pill for evernote's ability to retain its most valuable customers (the people who use the platform the most).
because evernote does not support selective sync, the company has a de facto kill switch for its most valuable customers. you have ceded control over your churn rate to computer hard drive manufacturers. the lifecycle of evernote premium customers — and hence our lifetime value to evernote — is simply defined by the size of local hard drives.
for me, your kill switch tripped today, when the size of my mandatory-sync evernote data finally began impacting the performance of my machine. had i been able to choose which notes i carry around and which notes are cloud-only, i would still be a customer. instead, today i began using one note - a competing product. until today, i was evernote power user and brand advocate.
its astonishing that this discussion (at least in this thread) is reduced to some kind of pseudo-democratic metaphor, where "enough votes" will somehow result in a feature being added to the engineering backlog. obviously, only a small number of people are hitting the kind of data volumes that make selective sync a "do or die" issue. but — in case this isn't totally obvious to evernote management — the small number of people asking for this are the ones at the top of your value segment.
please let me know if you ever implement selective sync. i'd love to come back to evernote someday.