It really pains me to say this but I am worried about the longevity of Evernote, a tool that I have been using for many, many years. So long in fact that I now have well over 30,000 notes stored in it.
Evernote co-founder Phil Libin always said that his aim was to create a “100-year startup” meaning that it’s “a company that’s around in 100 years, which means Evernote’s product needs to be durable.” Right now I cannot see them achieving that aim. Of course that aim could have been ditched when Libin left in 2016.
Why have I reached this conclusion? Well over the last year there have been increasing issues with Evernote’s products. For me this started when Skitch started playing up after the last OSX upgrade and after months of waiting for an update I got fed up of waiting and moved to Monosnap.
At around the same time the performance on my Evernote desktop client on my Mac got bad. Simple operations such as creating a new note took forever. Six months later I am still discussing with support what the underlying issue is. I’m told that they are working on a fix.
In the meantime I switched to the Evernote web client which has improved considerably since the last time I used it and it is almost , *almost*, comparable to the desktop app but not quite. Then a few days ago it stopped load. All I get is a white screen. If I open Chrome’s developer tools I can see an error being thrown which is the likely culprit so I have raised that too with support.
To add insult to injury the web clipper has stopped working too although I guess that could be related to the web app issue, maybe, maybe not.
So right now I am only able to access Evernote on my iPad which is ok but far from ideal.
The people on support have been great but that does not make the product work reliably, or hasn’t so far. I’d move to something else but I really don’t fancy trying to migrate 30,000 notes. And who’s to say I wouldn’t encounter the same issues? Who’s behind Bear and what’s their longevity likely to be? I could move to Microsoft’s OneNote but how likely is it that they get bored of it and drop support for it (although to be fair they have stuck with it for quite a long time!)
So I feel stuck and left with my fingers crossed that things pick up with Evernote and that they get back on track for the sake of my 37,775 notes if nothing else!