Goodbye Evernote 2.2

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Aug 27, 2010 at 01:26 PM

From a marketing perspective, I think time has shown EN made the right decision going to the cloud, and becoming a multi-platform product. Its market share has rocketed, and it has a developed a lot of loyalty.

Unfortunately, it has dumbed the product down in terms of original functionality, and become increasingly irritable when that is pointed out. At one point the company line was it the functionality would be restored.

This last version is perhaps the best yet - if one is not in need of the lost functionality.

One beautiful thing about EN is that you can have more than one window open, so you can a notes window, a first draft window, and be rewriting in a third window.

But its tagging is weak - especially compared to a program such as Surfulater. And Surfulater allows both a folders and tag structuring.

I very much wish Surfulater would enable multiple windows. If Surfulater did that, and had cloud capability, I think it is poised to eat some of Evernote’s market share.

One of the things that concerns me about EN is that its marketing folk play a little loose with the truth - such as when they talk about the product’s second anniversary.

Two years since the big changes began, maybe.

But the program is a lot older than two years. When the marketing boffins say two years, it kinds of rubs the noses of its original loyal users in the trash heap of lost functionality.

An EN plus - its Chrome extension for clipping is probably the fastest and best such extension I have ever used. In fact, even though EN is locally loaded on my computer, I prefer to clip first to the cloud and synch later because the extension makes it easier to add the tags.

Again, my hope is that Surfulater develops a Chrome extension, in addition to the multiple open windows, and cloud syncing - at that point I could switch everything over to Surfulater.

Even now, Surfulater is a better product if you have large amounts of data, related to many different subjects.

Daly

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>I wonder if Evernote made the right decision focussing simply on being a “cloud”
>application. At first, this seemed smart. But now there are so many ways to float your
>data back and forth across the digital void. On my PC at work I use a simple application
>called ResophNotes—which I learned about from Manfred Kuhn’s blog. It syncs with
>Simple Note, then Tinderbox on my Macbook syncs with Simple Note and I can share basic
>notes that way. Also, PersonalBrain syncs Brains via the cloud. I also have Dropbox
>available.
> >By sacrificing some of its original functionality, Evernote has made
>itself less useful and now it doesn’t have cloud syncing as a major point of difference
>anymore. Just a thought. Time will tell.
> >Steve Z.