I’ve had this nagging desire to write about Evernote and the mess that is my online storage life for the last few weeks. I use the product every single day to take notes, scan business cards, and clip interesting things from the web that I want to keep for future reference. I have also paid for the Premium version for quite some time as the product delivers a lot of value and I feel good supporting them.
The nagging feeling I wanted to write about is where Evernote is headed as a product given the evolving landscape of where people create and store their content. There is a growing list of companies fighting for my time and attention in their desire to be the place that I store all of my stuff. I’m trying to wrap my head around what all of this competition means for them and how they will respond.
Evernote is where I store text that I want to be able to retrieve or reference in the future. In many ways, I think the elephant logo is a perfect one – Evernote is where I put things that I don’t want to forget or lose.
The things i’ve been thinking about is the fractured nature of how I store my content online. I have things all over the place. In some cases it’s driven by functionality and features, and in some cases its driven by habit. Here’s a quick rundown as to how I store and manage things. Curious to hear how others manage things:
The other thing I will say that stands out for me about Evernote with regards to the other products and services that I mentioned above is that Evernote is primarily a single player experience for me. I regularly share things that I have stored in Google Drive with others. The same is true of Dropbox content. For me, though, Evernote is a place that I keep things that are important to me. Many of these items will not be shared with anyone else.
I wonder whether Evernote can continue to be an important product in my life if they are only the place where I store notes and web content that I find personally important. They don’t seem to be pushing aggressively into storing my photos, videos, or other documents, so I assume they are going to continue to pursue the status quo.
The other trend that plays into this is that many major technology companies now offer me large amounts of free storage to park my stuff with them. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, and others all allow me to store anywhere from a few gigabytes to unlimited amounts of storage for free. I expect the world to get more competitive and crowded with more people offering to store my stuff online.
For me, storage is a commodity. But the experience of interacting with the things I’ve stored is not a commodity, so offering more free storage (unless I am already at capacity) is not a compelling reason to switch. I find the Dropbox experience to be the most intuitive way to browse and search for many of the documents I’ve saved across multiple devices. I often wonder when Dropbox is going to make a bigger play in the content creation realm. If they had something like Quip as a native experience, that could be really powerful. And I really like the integrated experience of creating things in Google Docs and being able to easily send them out via Gmail – living in the all-Google world is a pretty good integrated experience.
It feels like things are shifting in this world and I can’t quite figure out how it’s all going to play out. As always, comments are open. You can also share your thoughts with me on Twitter @chudson.