Evernote's Renaissance: Why I'm Excited for Chapter Two

Unveiling my take on Evernote's feature expansion: Are these enhancements truly redefining productivity or complicating it.

Evernote has experienced many tumultuous years with different CEOs, different visions for the company, and a whole load of changes in the last year.

Many of those changes have focused a lot on subscription infrastructure and the elements of what Evernote is for the future. But recently, it has been vastly changing what they're doing and focusing a lot on the product.

Do I use Evernote anymore?

I wanted to give you some of my opinions on what I have as the precursor. I have used Evernote for maybe 12 years collectively. I technically still do use Evernote as a filing cabinet, but I would say I go into Evernote once every 2 to 3 weeks to find something, and I rarely add anything new. So, in terms of my use of it, it's almost nonexistent, but it is something that I think is a personal thing because I don't really take notes and more so make journal entries if I currently do on the reMarkable tablet.

Bending Spoons Acquisition & Recap

Just to give you some more context, for those who don't know, Evernote was acquired back in January 2023. There were a few months before the official announcement was made, and the timing was very rapid, which was good for many people.

This new announcement was quite big news, but largely, a lot of people were worried about where Bending Spoons, which is a mobile/AI company based in Italy, would take Evernote and the IP that Evernote had naturally acquired over the many years from its collective customers. Now, you could arguably argue that it has been damaged quite considerably by Evernote, particularly between the years of 2014 and 2019, as they changed business models, had security issues, and a wide variety of other aspects.

So, for many people, this acquisition was maybe a new chapter or maybe the end of the chapter, depending on how they look. Since their acquisition, Bending Spoons have removed all previous Evernote employees, including CEO Ian Small, and have changed a lot of aspects of the Evernote experience. Here are some of the things that they have done to Evernote since being purchased.

Bending Spoons has allowed for the development of a new infrastructure in Evernote. They have changed the pricing, almost doubling the pricing model. They have also changed what determines a free plan, limiting it to 50 notes and one notebook, and more recently, enhancing what a free, personal, and premium user gets collectively as they unified the features.

All of this has happened within one year since the acquisition, which is a lot of change for many people, including the previous employees of Evernote and the company themselves. Now, they are leading into a new era of product development and focusing on the next chapter.

The new design has been the start

So, the reason I wanted to talk about Evernote collectively is because in the last two months, I've been very impressed with the focus on infrastructure and the new elements that Bending Spoons have introduced to Evernote.

They have been turning their attention to the products and the Evernote experience, and in January, Evernote had one of the biggest UI overhauls it has seen in many years. While it wasn't a vast re-introduction of the experience, what it did was eliminate the sluggish look of Evernote on desktop and provided a clean and simple layout that just made sense.

You almost look at the previous experience of Evernote and wonder how it looked. They also took some time to redesign the application, which now looks a lot softer on the eyes, and paid attention to their marketing in terms of their website and illustrations, brand imagery. This definitely made Evernote feel much more alive than it has in many years.

So, Evernote has taken the cool concepts of marketing, design, and branding and already made a drastic improvement to what that looks like. Now, they're turning their attention, as of late January, to their product design and what the experience feels like, something a lot of people in the Evernote community have been talking about for years. Let's start with example number one.

The first example is the Outlook calendar, which is connected to the likes of the calendar inside of Evernote. This has been one of the top requested features for a while, and now connecting to Microsoft 365 is possible inside of your account. They haven't officially announced it, but largely, the function is working, allowing you to read your calendar and import important calendar events to take notes from meetings and much more.

This was definitely something that I thought would take a lot longer, but it seems like Evernote has already made a good step forward to add this and get started.

Now, next up was the focus on adding features or elements to each of your notes using the /command, something I have appreciated for many years as a way to quickly adjust information, whether that be a note link, a task, something that is already rolling out on the betas. This is something very good for just the experience of how many people might be reading this and curious why you are obsessed with these small micro-functions. Let me take you through a few more, and then I'll talk about that.

Next up is the ability to have collapsible sections in Evernote, something that people have been waiting for absolutely ages. This gives hierarchy to headings, bullet lists, numbered lists and, to be honest, while this is a small feature, it actually is something that can really be helpful when creating notes and, to be honest, something that should've been introduced into Evernote a very long time ago. The reason why I speak about all these micro features, such as the Outlook calendar, collapsible sections, /command, etc., is because they really should have been added a very, very long time ago. Since Evernote has been changing the infrastructure and released the desktop design, they've been focusing on the product more so in the last two months than Evernote has with the previous ownership in a very long time.

While I do give kudos to Evernote for focusing on tasks and calendar in the last span of a few years, these features took really, really long to produce and create. I know there was a lot of infrastructural changes with Evernote, but the overall experience wasn't drastically fast after they focused on those elements. Whereas since Bending Spoons has taken over, the core experience of Evernote is much, much faster, which is great news for just getting the ball rolling.

Next focus: Mobile & AI

No, you're probably reading this, trying to get an understanding of where my head's at with Evernote, and largely, I'm impressed that this company has done so much in the period of time so far. There's been a lot of change at Evernote, and I think it's been largely for the better, with a focus on product and the road ahead. But I actually don't think that chapter is yet to be fully revealed.

The main reason behind this is that the company that now runs Evernote, Bending Spoons, is well-known for two other applications, Remini and Splice. The company is currently going through a rapid change when it comes to their structure, acquisitions, and investment; they just took on an investment round of $155 million. For many people, this might seem scary, but I think Bending Spoons needs to be viewed as an exciting AI company that could be leaders in the space in the future, and that will filter down to their products. For example, they recently bought Meetup, which is a community site for organizing events. For many people, this acquisition seems strange, but I see there might be a lot of horizontal integration across other products down the line.

Now, Bending Spoons is one of the most well-known mobile developers, so this expertise has to come into the application for now, and I have an exciting feeling that the app might go a lot more mainstream in 2025 as they focus attention on this. I feel like it's only been a drop in the ocean of what I think the AI abilities coming to Evernote could be.

I feel like Evernote could actually be the leaders in a space with AI for note-taking in a couple of months as they put their attention towards it, as they've already released inside Remini and Splice, two well-known popular applications for Bending Spoons.

The main point

I think, largely, I'm just impressed with what Evernote is doing.

Maybe it's because they haven't done anything for quite a while in terms of vast product updates, but I've been impressed with what they've been producing. This is probably the production level of a typical company, but I feel like because Bending Spoons is behind it, there's an opportunity ahead, and I'm excited for the future.

So, I'll be keeping updated with their product releases and let's see what they do.

Evernote

Evernote is a note-taking application with tasks, calendar and AI features inside.

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