Evernote seems to be going through a phase of retrenchment. First we learned about some substantial staff cuts, and now today we have an announcement that they are ending support for Hello, Peek, Blackberry 7, and Blackberry Playbook:

https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/01/20/evernote-end-support-hello-peek-blackberry-7-playbook/

I'm not sure whether any of this is good or bad news for those of us who use Evernote, but it is a useful reminder of how transitory everything in the digital world is.

it is a useful reminder of how transitory everything in the digital world is.

More specifically, things in the cloud-based digital world. On the other hand, my 20 year old EccoPro still works just fine on Win7 :-)

You will certainly remember that I, some one year ago, asked why EN had about 155 developers on their payroll (any ideas upon this would have been welcomed, but no - so don't be astonished now that they asked themselves the same question, finally), which was an outrageous number even if you did NOT compare it with the usual 1-man corps we're accustomed to in the outlining business.

And re the second post, as I told you, there are versions of that program available in the web which will make you reinstall Win and all from scratch - so don't complain when following bad advice to download and install such versions (which are all "unauthorized" of course). But then, some people dream of an information world where any text is plain text, so let them pay their respective price to pay.

I don't read the Hello, Peek and Blackberry announcements on the blog as anything more than ordinary culling of little-used features, combining older features with new products, and eliminating support for obsoleted OS platforms. Things that every developer does over time.

For years I have been hearing predictions of EN's demise only to see it get bigger and more popular.

The thing that has convinced me recently that EN as a personal product (as opposed to some business collaboration platform) really could be dying was this thread on the EN forums: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/66103-power-user-discontent-best-alternatives-to-en/

The key thing about the thread is that participants include forum members who for *years* have been absolute 100% EN fans. People like BurgersNFries, who were crowned EN "evangelists" by the company and who monitored the forum constantly answering questions and coming out to attack anybody who dared to question EN's product trajectory -- and who now says she is abandoning the product for OneNote. A number of others on the thread have also been huge EN supporters or at least hugely involved in the EN community like JMichael and jbenson2. Now all of them are looking for alternatives.

When you lose your biggest fans -- and when they publicly use your forums to talk about how best to abandon your product -- that's a sign.

It's interesting to read employees' views on Glasshouse, too. Many (most) of them are saying that despite the enjoyable working conditions, nice colleagues etc., leadership is poor and the focus is constantly being switched from one priority to another.

Glasshouse

Glassdoor, perhaps?

Interesting to see the continued disarray at Evernote.

Re BurgersNFries - who was one reason I stopped reading EN forums a long time ago - quitting EN and her now lofty moderator position for One Note, I couldn't find the post where she says that. I did see a post where she included an excerpt from another user who was talking of going to OneNote.

I for the life of me couldn't see putting my 10,00 EN clips into OneNote and being able to organize them meaningfully.

I made the mistake of importing them all into NimbusNote, and finding out I couldn't change their order in the note list, as well as fact that many notes were duplicated.

So NimbusNotes became useless to me without figuring out how to trash all the EN imports without losing the new notes I had put in NN.

I actually like NN - it has promise.

Phil et al at EN have long ignored basics, like a good editing environment.

And EN's performance on Android has been less than spectacular in clipping. (Since Android upgraded to Lollipop on my Nexus7 even Google browser Chrome is compromised, along with its ability to work well with Pocket).

I fear that EN is headed for a nasty downfall. Meanwhile, Phil et al seem to see the future in terms of seamless integration of paper (Moeskine, eg) and the digital, which is not a bad idea. But, they have never got the point of providing the basic - a good editing environment, and improved information management features (metadata, enhanced tag management, etc).

Daly

dan7000 wrote:

For years I have been hearing predictions of EN's demise only to see it
get bigger and more popular.

The thing that has convinced me recently that EN as a personal product
(as opposed to some business collaboration platform) really could be
dying was this thread on the EN forums:
https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/66103-power-user-discontent-best-alternatives-to-en/

The key thing about the thread is that participants include forum
members who for *years* have been absolute 100% EN fans. People like
BurgersNFries, who were crowned EN "evangelists" by the company and who
monitored the forum constantly answering questions and coming out to
attack anybody who dared to question EN's product trajectory -- and who
now says she is abandoning the product for OneNote. A number of others
on the thread have also been huge EN supporters or at least hugely
involved in the EN community like JMichael and jbenson2. Now all of
them are looking for alternatives.

When you lose your biggest fans -- and when they publicly use your
forums to talk about how best to abandon your product -- that's a sign.

I had a brief look into Dan7000's link to the EN forum.

Don't take me wrong: Having said that EN is a lifestyle product, I never alleged En was near sort of a demise. It's just that I think that notwithstanding its state-of-the-art import facilities, unparalleled but by ON's ones, professionals more or less fast grow out of its limitation of flattening out your information to a degree that quite quickly will become unbearable (cf., but slightly less so, ON).

On the other hand, it's no surprise that it being also a collaboration tool, since its strengths quite lend it to be used for that purpose, without its weaknesses too much coming into bright sunlight then (i.e. at least at the beginning, and once you've got all your stuff in (all the more so, a rented-by-time-and-per-multiple-user) some tool, chances are you cling to it for some time at least).

This being said, it's clear as day that even for multi-geographical collaboration, the absence of functionality to properly manage "back office"-like information repositories, will soon hamper the productivity of EN work groups, but as said, then it's deemed "to late" to change to something better.

And to say it all, their 155 developers-at-some-time... well, as we all know, some corporations sometimes try to appear bigger than they really are. I've been in sw development too long for being so totally mistaken in evaluating possible coding efforts in code lines and time, and whilst in some films, you only can shake your head about where all that money may have gone, for me the ultimate revelation in being-too-dumb-to-understand had certainly been the information (or allegation) that EN employed 155 coders-and-such.

If now it's deemed less (than that unconfirmed number), that's no wonder. I'm wondering just about the fact that so many life stylers are able to organize their life style within EN successfully: And N.B.: I'm not even speaking of "shallow lifes" or such, no:

Let's face it, folks: Most people do with a tenth (or in my case: with a hundredth) of our information repositories, and not necessarily less successfully than information addicts (as we are?) do.

I always said it, there's some lessons to be learned from EN's success, and they are far from being "finished" or something at this point in time.

I was one of those diehard Evernote users who defended Evernote and I posted several times in the power user thread you referenced.

They they pulled a major feature I and others had put a lot of time into - shared notebooks. I was using these to create time management coaching notebooks for my clients. Evernote did put it back when we complained, but this just showed me the danger of relying on a company that could just arbitrarily delete a feature used by many users without notice.

At that point, I moved entirely from Evernote to OneNote and haven't looked back. I do miss the vibrant Evernote forum, but OneNote supports the way that I am sharing notebooks. I did find a better OneNote forum here:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/117204050916106398006

Not up to the level of the EN forum, but people are very helpful there.

dan7000 wrote:

For years I have been hearing predictions of EN's demise only to see it
get bigger and more popular.

The thing that has convinced me recently that EN as a personal product
(as opposed to some business collaboration platform) really could be
dying was this thread on the EN forums:
https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/66103-power-user-discontent-best-alternatives-to-en/

The key thing about the thread is that participants include forum
members who for *years* have been absolute 100% EN fans. People like
BurgersNFries, who were crowned EN "evangelists" by the company and who
monitored the forum constantly answering questions and coming out to
attack anybody who dared to question EN's product trajectory -- and who
now says she is abandoning the product for OneNote. A number of others
on the thread have also been huge EN supporters or at least hugely
involved in the EN community like JMichael and jbenson2. Now all of
them are looking for alternatives.

When you lose your biggest fans -- and when they publicly use your
forums to talk about how best to abandon your product -- that's a sign.