UPDATED 13:00 EDT / NOVEMBER 24 2014

Evernote, I love you but you annoy me

angry elephant green sculpture statue stoneDear Evernote: I love you, but you are getting on my nerves. I realize what we used to call “groupware” has never developed as most of us hoped, but if I wanted SharePoint, I wouldn’t have subscribed to Evernote in the first place.

In short: Why can’t software companies just leave well enough? Why do applications have to expand until they consume all the oxygen in the room? They start by doing one thing really well and expand into things they don’t do so well.

Raging capitalism or not, isn’t it sometimes better to start a new app than to keep adding appendages to an old one?

Evernote is, to me, a glorified flat file database into which I can drop files and create notes, with Evernote making them easily searchable. Today, I guess this is better called a personal data cloud since I don’t have to know how it is structured. And I can get at all my stuff from anywhere — which is the real non-secret of Evernote’s considerable success.

I like and use the “email to Evernote” feature as a quick way to get information into my Evernote account. I like being able to easily share information with coworkers and friends.

I don’t use lots of tags, but full-text searching (even of text in photographs) is a killer feature for me. I also love Skitch, the image annotation software you purchased and give away for free.

All these add core functionality to Evernote as a digital catch-call. What I don’t need is groupware, which is what Evernote has started trying to sell me. And if I was building groupware, it would not start as Evernote (or Dropbox, for that matter).

I do not, for example, need yet another group chat program. One more single-purpose (as in chatting with my Evernote-enabled coworkers) app isn’t helpful to me.  There is also a feature that connects my notes to supposedly helpful and related information from major business publications. That sounds bothersome and irrelevant, but in a helpful sort of way.

I really need versioning, locking, group editing with tracked changes, none of which are mentioned on the Evernote Business page, which really doesn’t say much at all if you look at it.

Evernote Business is also expensive — and yes, I noticed you’ve jacked-up the price of Evernote Premium from $45-a-year to $5-a-month, which is pretty substantial. The Buisness version is $10/month-per-user. Which is more than I pay for Microsoft Office and unlimited OneDrive storage. Gee, which is a better value? My entire office suite or a group flat file database?

And, yes, more Microsoft Office integration, please.

I understand that some people will want and appreciate Evernote Business, but the implementation, while it looks simple enough, hasn’t impressed me. And let’s not even talk about the Post-It note integration or pretty much everything in the Evernote Market.

This cosmic disconnect makes me feel it’s a happy accident you created something I use and really like, rather than great product planning. I hope Evernote Business won’t cause a stop in improvements to the feature set of Premium, just keep the groupware attempt somewhere I don’t have to see it.

And, one last thing, when does Google buy Evernote?

Your Pal and frustrated admirer,

David

 

 

photo credit: lichterkettenraucher via photopin cc

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