Evernote-Conference
Bending Spoons has a vision for Evernote
As a longtime Evernote user and frequent collaborator with the team, I’ve always felt a deep connection to the app. But a recent Vergecast episode with David Pierce and Federico Simionato made me see things from a different perspective.
However, before that, “The Great Evernote Reboot” episode title evoked a wave of nostalgia. It made me remember all the years I went to the Evernote Conferences and when the company and its products were on the news all the time. Ironically, that nostalgia made me freeze for a moment and skip that episode. I wanted to listen to it with attention and give it the deserved respect and treatment. In honesty, it felt like a special moment.
The features discussed didn’t surprise me, though. For example, I just published a video about the sidebar customization. But Pierce’s approach was like turning things around just enough to give me a new perspective on Evernote’s direction after the Bending Spoons acquisition.
The goal is not to give users all the features they’ve been asking for quite some time. That’s great, but the main goal seams to be re-examining many things, from what Evernote is about for its users to the company’s revenue model. It is about focus and making the company sustainable for years to come. In a way, it feels like a reboot of the “100-year start-up” mantra, and I love it.
But listening to this episode also taught me a valuable lesson: sometimes, all it takes is a well-crafted question to gain a fresh perspective, even on something as familiar as Evernote.
What inspired me to move from Obsidian Publish to Microblog?
TL;DR: a gateway to a thriving online presence
What if I told you there is a tool that can replace your blog, website, newsletter, podcast, bookshelf, and more? 🤯 It’s even compatible with the ActivityPub protocol.
In a recent article, I discussed how owning a domain and using permalinks can help you seamlessly move from one hosting service to another without losing your audience. Then I published another article devoted to describing a similar approach for your social media presence
Well, there is a way to combine the best of both words in a single place. Better yet, what if you could also include other services, like a newsletter? Have I mentioned that the price is a fraction of what you would pay for a combination of similar services from other companies?
Since this is too good to be true, I feel like a disclaimer is needed. No, this is not a sponsored post. I paid for my subscription, and no one at Micro.blog had any input on this article or any content I’ve been publishing about them. I’m doing it because, as you already know, I’m an enthusiast.
Anyway, I hope you’ll find the information below helpful.
My previous set-up
I have an institutional website for many years, but have been posting my articles on Medium for a long time to take advantage of the algorithm. Two YouTube channels, one in Portuguese and another in English, a newsletter hosted by Substack, and a presence on multiple social media platforms.
I believe that diversifying like this helps spread the word because I can take advantage of algorithms from multiple platforms. However, my entire business is run by myself, and things can quickly become overwhelming. So much so that last year I was forced to pause my newsletter for several months.
Why Obsidian Publish didn’t work for me
When I moved my website from WordPress to Obsidian Publish, I was trying to simplify things by having my notes and the website in the same tool. But if I’m being honest, it ended up creating more work. Not because of the publishing process, which is easy and straight-forward. The problem was me. I love taking notes, so I suddenly felt compelled to share as much as I could, and that came with its own set of complications.
Instead of just taking notes, I was constantly thinking about how to structure my notes to have them ready for use and, at the same time, good for publishing. Furthermore, my folders structure became a little chaotic due to the numerous additional files needed to create a website. I was constantly afraid of accidentally moving or deleting files.
There’s no way to have a blog when using Obsidian Publish, but I was kind of okay with that because Medium was my blogging platform at the time. I also read numerous complaints about SEO, but I’m not a specialist on this topic and cannot say much about it. However, the final hurdle was the verification process at Mastodon, which could never identify the needed code because of the way Obsidian Publish builds the website.
I couldn’t care less about verification, but I have already been impersonated, and unfortunately, some people following my YouTube channel in Portuguese were scammed. After that, I’ve been constantly trying to do all I can to prevent it from happening again.
What’s next?
In 2022, I tried Micro.blog, but it lasted for less than a year. It was the way the platform handled engagement that made me give up on it. If you would like to learn more about it, have already explained everything in more detail in another article.
For those of you who are not aware of Micro.blog, it’s a complete solution. It is a space to share short posts like ‘tweets’ and pictures, a blog, a website, a newsletter, a podcast hosting service, and many other amenities like bookmarks plus a ‘read it later’ with a highlights feature, a bookshelf, and more. And the price is amazing. US$5 or US$10, depending on the features you need. To learn more about it, I suggest you watch the video below. But beware that it doesn’t cover all its potential.
I still have my two YouTube channels, and they are not going anywhere. But I reactivated my blog on Micro.blog. I won’t stop publishing the articles on Medium, but I started adding a Canonical Link.
Micro.blog can be set to share the same content on other websites, like Medium. However, for now, I’m doing it manually.
ActivityPub
Regarding the newsletter, I am still using Substack, but I also intend to transition it to Micro.blog in the future. However, the feature in which I’m most interested is precisely the one that made me live in the first place. The blog is compatible with ActivityPub and, as explained in another article, anyone can follow it from any Fediverse service.
The strategy Flipboard is using inspired me. Their Mastodon instance — flipboard.social — works as a Twitter alternative, where the community can share and interact with one another. As for flipboard.com, it is being converted to be 100% compatible with the ActivityPub protocol. If all of this seems too much, please watch the video below. It may help you better understand the terminology I used above.
My plan is to rebuild my Twitter community on Mastodon, while Micro.blog will host my blog, site, and other services, acting as a central point to help people access all the content I’m constantly sharing online.
Nostalgia
This doesn’t necessarily count as a rational reason, but since when is feeling at home something that’s rational? When I first tried Microblog in 2022, I noticed a familiar face among the team: Jean MacDonald. I had the opportunity to meet here only twice for brief moments during the 2013 and 2014 Evernote Conferences. Nevertheless, the conversations we had were so pleasant that those moments remain etched in my memory to this day.
In conclusion, there’s nothing terribly wrong with Obsidian Publish. On the contrary, during those months I used it, it proved to be a fast and reliable service. But there’s no blog or ActivityPub there, and those are some reasons why Microblog is gradually becoming my online home.
Another reason, as I mentioned before, is that Micro.blog can work as a hub for publications. At some point in the future, when I finish my migration process, I’ll start using it to automatically cross-post content to other social media platforms.
Combined with all the other benefits I mentioned above, I’m expecting Micro.blog to significantly reduce the work I currently do every time I publish a new article or video.
What went wrong with Evernote? How did we get here?
I expect negative comments on every video or article I publish about Evernote now. Sadly, talking about it makes me feel anxious.
I don’t think Evernote is doomed, but there is a profound shift in perception going on. It used to be that going to the Evernote Conference was the most important moment I looked forward to every year. It was great to see my friends, clients, developers, and the Evernote team.
Furthermore, sharing news from the conference or anything else Evernote released throughout the year had such positive vibes. Now, it’s difficult to ignore all the negativity out there.
But the mood didn’t shift at once; it rarely does.
It all started many years ago
In July 2015, Phil Libin stepped down as CEO, and Chris O’Neill initiated a series of changes that made many of us, myself included, uneasy with the future of the company, or, in other words, our notes.
Evernote had a family of companion apps, and the new CEO gradually discontinued most of them, making many of us unhappy. But moving Evernote’s database to Google Cloud and the layoffs kicked off the first negative wave I’ve ever seen. At least, I do not recall anything similar during the Libin years.
I have to believe that from a financial standpoint, moving to Google servers was the best course of action. Even Apple used Google’s service in the early stages of iCloud. And I think they still do. However, the public’s perception was distorted by the way the media covered all the other CEO decisions.
For instance, I recall reading articles that referred to Evernote’s headquarters as a “ghost town.” I was furious about that; it made no sense. Back when Libin was CEO, or, in other words, before the layoffs, I visited the company and can attest that the building was not fully occupied. As far as memory serves, floors one and two were completely empty. Not even desks! The idea was to have enough room to grow in the future.
Nevertheless, I can relate to the anger and frustration people felt. The way the story was told made it hard to tell the difference between noise and reality, which leads me to the topic of communication. I’ve always found Evernote to be terrible at conveying decisions to its users. And the problem is still present. For instance, I believe that transferring operations to Europe was an excellent decision, but again, the public perception was different.
When you are hosting people’s memories, you don’t have the luxury of being as secretive as Apple or carless as a cable TV announcing the new version of its app. Every decision has to be over communicated.
I’m not sure why, but one thing that made me upset was the end of Evernote Market. Possibly because some of the products made it easier to organize things in real life, like we were used to doing in Evernote. Anyway, I was sad to see that go.
[!cite] Over the past few years, more than 800,000 Evernote Moleskine notebooks and 300,000 Jot Script styluses were sold worldwide. Through Market’s website alone, we sold nearly 20,000 ScanSnap Evernote Edition scanners.
Market gave us the opportunity to illustrate the true value of Evernote to folks who hadn’t yet considered a Premium subscription. In fact, nearly half of the folks who shopped the Evernote Market were paying us for the first time.
Ultimately though, Evernote is a software company.
Communication, communication, communication. I don’t have all the facts, and I believe all of us try to make the best decisions based on the information we have available at the moment. But the way the official blog post was written suggests that the Market was successful, “but we are ending it anyway.”
As for:
[!cite] Instead of selling and fulfilling orders ourselves, on February 3rd [2016], we will transition the Market to promote Evernote-integrated products made and sold by our partners at Adonit, Moleskine, and PFU. We plan to continue adding partners and integrations that strongly and elegantly complement Evernote to that list.
The transition lasted for a brief moment. It didn’t take long before everything stopped being sold. I have many items in my collection, but the Evernote Market was much bigger.
Recently, I learned in an interview with Libin that when he was the CEO, the Market was profitable, but its benefits went way beyond that. I messaged O’Neill on LinkedIn months ago, inviting him to an interview on my channel to talk about his time as CEO, but I never heard back.
The last thing I remember from O’Neill’s tenure as CEO was the fervor the company generated on social media to unveil a “fresh brand identity”. Once again, the issue of communication was affecting Evernote. There was a lot of criticism about spending time and money on a logo instead of addressing the problems with the app.
Regarding the old logo, did you know that the elephant trunk is hiding the letter e?
A frustrating web client
If you are a subscriber to my YouTube channel, you know that I try crazy experiments all the time. Well, back in 2018, I tried to run my entire consulting business on a Chromebook. The Chromebook paired with Google Workspace and Trello performed exceptionally well, but the Evernote web* client, which was limited at the time, ended up being a major drawback in my plan.
* It should be noted that the decision to oversimplify the web client was taken when Phil Libin was CEO.
My experiment and what was going on with Evernote (the company) at that time made me think about switching to a different app for the first time. My consulting business is about helping companies build mindful Kanban workflows using tools like Trello, so I thought Notion would be a perfect fit for my notes and Kanban workflows.
I moved some of them, played with Notion for a while, and made couple videos for my YouTube channel in Portuguese, but even though I love all the cool stuff Notion has to offer, the database vibe doesn’t appeal to me. If I were to switch to a different app, note-taking would have to be its main feature. Perhaps that is the reason why I am currently enjoying Obsidian.
Ahead of its time?
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about Evernote’s series of managerial missteps along the way, but analyzing events in hindsight is always unfair. Other times, I believe the problem was timing. It is possible that Evernote was too ahead of its time and didn’t find a way to use this advantage in its favor.
For instance, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to test the Obsidian Map View plugin, and I couldn’t stop wondering why Evernote removed the fantastic map feature the app had back in the day.
Most people don’t even know this, but when we create a note, the app always attempts to save the coordinates of where the note was created. Evernote map view would simply show all notes with coordinates on a map. That’s it. We didn’t have to deal with any configuration.
It was a great feature, as were many others that were discontinued. In contrast, the Obsidian Map View plugin is difficult to set up, but at least it exists for people like me who want to see their notes on a map. Why? Well, you should watch the video below to be amazed by how many interesting use cases people can come up with this feature.
Evernote even had AI back in 2014, but the “A” stood for augmented. Features like context and handwriting OCR were among the many innovations the company came up with. To learn more about the challenges and the ideas they had for the future, I encourage you to watch my interview with Phil Libin on this topic.
Even today, with so many of these marvels gone, it’s still hard to find an app that’s both easy for non-tech-savvy people to use and that also packs in so many useful features.
But when a company stops innovating, others will take over. Steve Jobs famously said that if Apple hadn’t taken the iPod’s market share with the iPhone, other companies probably would have.
Do you remember?
Did you know that back in 1999, in the days of dial-up and DSL Internet, there was a service called Yahoo Briefcase that would create a ‘Y’ drive in our computers and allow us to synchronize files to the cloud?
That’s correct; Yahoo had it many years before Dropbox. But I bet that young people believe that Google and other companies invented services pioneered by Yahoo. The book “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!” has some chapters about how Yahoo missed the chance to be even bigger than today’s version of Google. Instead, it ended up as a Verizon subsidiary with a financial channel on YouTube.
Palm’s path was much harder than Yahoo’s. They were inventing a new market, and if that wasn’t tough enough for the team to deal with, the company went through numerous ownership changes and never found its way to a stable future. It’s mind-boggling to me that an entire generation is unaware of the remarkable products this company invented.
If you believe that the idea of having a personal assistant in your pocket was created by Apple with the iPhone, here is a good book for you: “Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry.”
The Apple II was the first computer I owned as a teenager, but my Palm PDA and Yahoo services were tools I used professionally for a long time, and I still miss some of Palm’s features. I wish these companies had continued to evolve, but, as I mentioned before, market forces cannot be controlled.
A bright future?
The year is 2018, and here we go again. Evernote has a new CEO, Ian Small. I’d say his main accomplishment was solving a problem that no one else had the courage to deal with before him.
Evernote had apps for Android, iOS, Mac, Web, and Windows, but I always referred to them as “versions” because they were so different from each other. The original management team had a reason for this approach, but in retrospect, it never worked well for us, the users. For instance, formatting a note using one of these “versions” would, more often than not, break it in another. However, I believe the worst consequence was that it slowed down innovation.
Evernote 10 was a necessary evil that created so many complications for the end user. It had to be done. It was a long-overdue project. Furthermore, it took longer than expected, and it was hit by COVID-19. And, again, more features were removed from the app.
Can you see a pattern here? From a user’s perspective, Evernote is constantly removing features and working to fix new bugs.
But for the first time, Evernote established an astonishing channel of communication with its users. The behind-the-scenes videos with the CEO, the blog posts, and many other projects created a new kind of collaboration between us and the company.
Small’s courage to rewrite all the clients was both bold and necessary. But it also means that from a technical standpoint, Evernote 10 was an entirely new app, and like every new piece of software, there may be several unknown bugs.
The good news is that 10 opened the doors to innovation. Evernote Home and its great widgets, such as the calendar and filtered notes, tasks, notes filters, and backlinks, came after 10 was introduced. Even the Real-Time Editing feature was being worked on by Ian’s team for many, many months before the Bending Spoons acquisition.
There are frequent complaints about bugs, but the way I see it, Evernote had no other options. They had to deal with the multiple apps that were incompatible with each other. It was either no more innovation or dealing with some bugs for a while.
However, my concern is somewhat distinct. I think Small’s decision to move development towards the “Accomplish Anything” vision was a great idea. The new features his team created brought our notes to the next level, and the way he spoke about Evernote was a clear indication that many more similar features would be coming. Unfortunately, I have no idea what Bending Spoons plans are for Evernote.
I am a fan of Small and his accomplishments, but what I hope to understand one day is why the company was sold. Was it his decision? The board’s? Was it an offer? What happened?
The Bending Spoons era
I have no doubt that Bending Spoons is working hard to fix all the problems they inherited, but they may be running out of time. The bugs, along with the layoffs, price increases, and other unpopular decisions, may be hurting Evernote credibility too quickly. To add more salt to the injury, the connection Small’s team built with the community by being so transparent is slowly disappearing.
I believe Bending Spoons has everything it takes to make it right, but only time will tell if they will be able to replace the iPod with the iPhone or end up like Palm, Yahoo, and so many other fascinating companies that are long gone.
Visiting Evernote
I decided to stay in San Francisco for a few more days after the Evernote Conference to visit Evernote and some other companies.
Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take pictures inside the building, so these and other similar photos are all I have from my visit to Evernote headquarters in Redwood City. Fortunately, I was given a full tour.
At the entrance there is a small cafeteria where employees can make their own coffee and drink it in Evernote cups. There’s also a small shop selling items from the Evernote Market and the famous chalkboard wall.
The first floors of the building are empty. In fact, they are quite raw; there isn’t even any finishing to the space. I was told the size of the building was thought to still fit everyone when the company grows. The upper floors are where people actually work and where I had the opportunity to meet and talk to different teams. One thing that surprised me was how many people knew who I was.
One interesting detail I noticed were the many walls pained with a special paint that makes them work as a whiteboard. Sometimes, people meet in front of a wall, have a conversation about a project, write or draw something on the wall, and then take a picture with Evernote. Pretty cool!
Before heading back to San Francisco, I had lunch with the marketing team at the cafeteria.
It was a nice experience to see where my beloved app is being built.
More present than his other suppliers from across the city
When I began consulting for Amaral Maia Sociedade de Advogados, located over 1.000 km away from me, many of my customers were already remote. But this was the first time a CEO told me something so special.
Even though it was a long project, the CEO and co-founder, Antonio Maia and I only met in person at the 2014 Evernote-Conference. That’s when he told me that I was always more present than his other suppliers from across the city. I always believed in building strong relationships with my clients, regardless of distance, so this was such a lovely compliment to receive.
The consulting project with Amaral Maia Sociedade de Advogados was selected by Evernote for my presentation at the conference, which you can watch below.
Evernote Trunk Conference 2012
There are so many good things happening currently in my life. Not only am I currently writing a book about Evernote, but I was recently selected to join the companies’s Ambassador program. And then the unimaginable happened. I was invited to the 2012 edition of the Evernote Trunk Conference. This is such an honor.
It’s great to be here, but it could have been an entirely different outcome. My US visa was valid, but my passport was expired. The issue I faced was that Evernote’s invitation was extended just a few weeks before the event, so I had very little time to go through the process of renewing my passport. I got it two days before the trip, so I think you can imagine how stressed I was.
Anyway, after that holster of emotions, there I was at the Concourse Exhibition Center & Trade Show Facility. It was great to be among so many enthusiasts like me.
Blending Analog and Digital
Listening to Phil-Libin share his ideas and vision for the product was a fantastic experience, but there was more. The announcement of the Moleskin partnership happened in such a clever way. When we got back to the conference room, we found this envelope with the words “Do not open.”
After listening to Arrigo Berni, the CEO of Moleskin, we were finally introduced to this new product. The Evernote camera will “understand” stickers that come with the Evernote Moleskin, automatically save them to a preselected notebook, and even add tags. I can’t wait to use this and share my thoughts.
And to top it all off, I managed to snap a pic with Phil-Libin before I headed out. It was such a great day. Thank you, Evernote, for inviting me! I loved every minute of every moment of it.
