Evernote Troubles and Actions

Back in October 2011 I started a journey on Evernote – and have been an avid user since then.

Evernote started out as a Note Capturing Offering – where I had the chance to save all the random stuff I wanted to keep — Mind you, I was / am still a data hoarder, and as such there was too much need for a decent solution for this.

Over the years, my storage and note content grew, I recall a time when I was at the 30K notes mark (2019), and as such found myself at a crossroad where storing this amount of content did not make sense. I went on a journey of removing unnecessary content and streamline my note and content capturing.

We should just take a quick stop and describe the initial use case of Evernote. Back in the days, the focus was around having notes (written, small attachments, web pages and more) saved for later usage, to be able to Tag it (grouping it) and store it in folders (librarian style).

Just to make sure that everyone understands, there has been quite of other tools that I have tested over time, some survived my use case (Microsoft OneNote) other didn’t (never found the glory of obsidian and box. notes relevant – and many others that I simply have forgotten).

Covid did hit this world hard, some software offerings grew (wow, for MS-Teams and Zoom) others had a very hard time making money (including Evernote) and as such there was not the funding available for us to see traction and I starting “cleaning out my closet, and removing all the junk I had in my folders (just remember one thing, it was not due to any kind of maximum, rather to be able to cope with the volume of data).

I did what I had to do about my “hoarding problem” and slimmed the content down from 30K to about 2K notes (who needs to save old Podcast (MP3) and 1000s of PDF that was downloaded from the Internet, just in case. A function (mail to) was heavily used to collect my newsletters, so I had a single place to read them (?? What was wrong with an email client, I just used to tool to capture everything) – and that was my problems.

The problems on the platform (technology debt) and the fact that the company was not able to make profit – made the end of 2022 as the time of change, the company and ownership was sold to an Italian Owner (Bending Spoons) to the uproar of the market. I will not comment on this (still today) ongoing discussion, but it is fair to say if there was no new owner the Evernote would have died a slow death into a software black hole.

(More to come)