The Verge: Evernote's new CEO on the company's critics: 'I love to be underestimated'

[Frank.dg 1,385]

An interview with Evernote CEO Chris O'Neill on theverge.com

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/4/11584764/evernote-ceo-chris-oneill-interview

Hope they do strip away Work Chat...

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

@Frank.dg, thanks for sharing.  It's an interesting read.

Although Mr. O'Neill reaffirmed their commitment to focus on their core product, core values, it also seems like Evernote is still trying to find their real niche.  As he said "It’s interesting — Forrester or IDC, they don’t have a category for "note-taking." But we intuitively know, you have groups like students and knowledge workers that basically take notes for a living".  Yet there are very few serious, note-taking apps that go beyond just being a notepad.  Only 3 come to mind:  Evernote, OneNote, and DevonThink (Mac only).

It's interesting to me that few people today talk about PIMs (Personal Information Managers), which, IMO, go way beyond just note-taking.  If you read the Wikipedia article on PIMs (my link), you'll see that most of the features listed there are provided by Evernote.  Yet, interestingly enough, I've never seen Evernote market itself as a PIM.  Maybe that term is just too old-school for today's tech users. 

As we have seen with the recent Betas and GA releases for both EN Win and EN Mac, Evernote seems to still be struggling with developing a solid design that will appeal to and work for large numbers of users.  The reliability does seem to be better now, as I'm seeing fewer new bugs produced with each update.

For now, I'm still very positive on Evernote, although it does make me nervous when I see Evernote drop key features, like showing note dates on the main window, and the dedicated Tag View, in a production release (like EN Win 6.0.6).

[Moe Notes 14]

Evernote is the largest, most mission-critical application I've ever used with such a huge identity crisis.

I just recently updated to v6 for Windows – and my most common workflow. "F6 to initiate search, start typing, select a tag or notebook from dropdown" is very BROKEN. Sigh. Do I have a few extra hours to figure out how to get BACK a workflow I had already? 

This is a common experience with Evernote over the years.

It's so bad I once considered consulting for Evernote (i'm an Unemployable Entrepreneur) because there seems to be a huge chasm between the engineers and the users.

JMichaelTX, the loss of tag view was DEFINITELY noticed and it really makes me scratch my head. WTF are they thinking about over there? What are they talking about in those use case meetings? Ugh. Ugh.

There's way too much (customer) attention, power, and influence being squandered IMO.

[Helen Crozier 6]

I'm nervous that they do something with work chat and have been for a while. I have clients who love it. I also use it myself. Interesting how we have different views on certain features  :-)

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

10 hours ago, Helen Crozier said:

I'm nervous that they do something with work chat and have been for a while. I have clients who love it. I also use it myself. Interesting how we have different views on certain features  :-)

If it were me, I'd start looking for other tools for chat and collaboration.  The way I read Mr. O'Neill is that he recognized that those are NOT in Evernote's core service/features, and that other apps already provide great solutions for those features.  IMO, Evernote does a very poor job of both chat and collaboration.

[wlfende 0]

I am with EN-PREMIUM for about 3 years (before I worked with DevonThingsPro) and  now I was just thinking about to change from an EN notebook oriented system to an EN tag version (TSW), because over the years with a growing number of notes (now > 20,000)  searching notes took more and more time. The response-time definitely became to long.

The title of this discussion and even more the remarks from JMichaelTX do not make me happy too.

Before investing in a 3rd DataRetrievingSystem I think I will wait for some time to see what will happen with EN first in relation to its DBMS system and second its integrationadaption of IQTELL and releated apps and PIMs.

Hope to hear some good news from the new CEO and his crew.

 

 

[Frank.dg 1,385]

On 5/17/2016 at 2:32 PM, wlfende said:

Hope to hear some good news from the new CEO and his crew

The article referenced is extremely good news. This resulting thread with speculation, opinions and but's is what happens when people read more than they should into any situation... who knows, maybe out of boredom. The fact is that whether Evernote has had an identity crisis or not... it shows that they are in flux and moving forward... and Evernote's core experience, notwithstanding the frills and spills from season to season, has remained pretty much consistent. This is a typical case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. 

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I thought the article was pretty good, myself.

Sure, I'd like to finally see some movement on obstacles that prevent me from making as much use of Evernote as I would like (selective sync and encryption), and I can still only use Evernote for a tiny portion of my daily work.

But it seems to me like he has a good attitude about the product and has indicated a direction that will probably please a lot of users. It would be difficult to deny that huge improvements have been made to the apps since he took on the job, and there are still a surprisingly small number of real competitors out there in this space (development at Keep and OneNote seems to have slowed to a crawl). Perhaps this will be the year when they get back to the kind of growth we used to see in the old days. 

And, it was good to see that they've still got a large user base (about 150 million). 

[cmj05sc 2]

I think I would rebrand work chat.  My wife and I use it all the time as an easy place to share notes and my buddy is a phd candidate and when I'm throwing out ideas its the easiest way to do it from within the note taking experience.

[ClutterBGone 152]

On 5/6/2016 at 2:53 AM, Moe Notes said:

Evernote is the largest, most mission-critical application I've ever used with such a huge identity crisis.

I just recently updated to v6 for Windows – and my most common workflow. "F6 to initiate search, start typing, select a tag or notebook from dropdown" is very BROKEN. Sigh. Do I have a few extra hours to figure out how to get BACK a workflow I had already? 

This is a common experience with Evernote over the years.

It's so bad I once considered consulting for Evernote (i'm an Unemployable Entrepreneur) because there seems to be a huge chasm between the engineers and the users.

JMichaelTX, the loss of tag view was DEFINITELY noticed and it really makes me scratch my head. WTF are they thinking about over there? What are they talking about in those use case meetings? Ugh. Ugh.

There's way too much (customer) attention, power, and influence being squandered IMO.

4

Still using Evernote version 4.6.7.8409 for Windows on my desktop! No lag time, no work chat, still have tag view and very fast search! I always download the newest version to my laptop see what the "folks at EV" have removed or made difficult to use or find! Always just go back to the desktop computer and version 4.6.7, it just works!
Regards,
David in Wichita