Evernote does not actually want you to use it to “remember everything.”
Evernote tells its users not to use it for file storage.
For much of its life, Evernote’s tagline has been “remember everything.” Its blog, as of this writing, still uses that slogan in the title. Lots of people had “aha!” moments about the usefulness of Evernote when they finally started dumping everything in it. Not just their notes, but all their files, including MS Office docs, PDFs, receipts, audio recordings — just about anything that could be generated or scanned. (See this Lifehacker article as one example.)
But, on April 29, 2015, Evernote updated its “User Guidelines” by adding “language describing Intended Uses and Unsupported Uses of the Evernote Service.” Now:
In other words, in using Evernote, we agree that we will not use it to “remember everything,” but instead just the things “that support the way we work together.” That means not using it for “file storage/archiving.” Curiously, the timing of the new User Guidelines came on the day Evernote announced that its premium service would start supporting unlimited uploads, removing the previous limit of 4 gigabytes per month, which itself was a recent increase from 1GB/mo. It’s like Evernote said, “Here, have all the cake you want, but eating it is not an Intended Use of the cake!”
Some — including me — who tried using Evernote as an everything bucket found that performance suffered the more that went into it. And then there have been those bugs. So many bugs. Defining “Intended Uses” more limited than the product is one form of bug spray, I suppose.
Nothing else does everything Evernote does in the way it does it. It’s why people continue to use Evernote despite the bugs. It is malleable, robust, and useful, making capturing and recalling ideas, resources, and files across multiple devices a better experience than so many prior systems. Now, though, Evernote has admitted that what it built can’t support the “remember everything” pitch. That’s something a lot of people found out on their own. What remains is a focus on using “Work Chat,” which is quite a loss.
