The New Coke Lesson [GTD Wannabe]
Readers who have been around for a while might recall that I’m a big EverNote fan (note the capital N). You may be wondering why I haven’t blogged about the new Evernote (note the little n) 3 beta here…
Well, I’d like to say that it’s because my mother taught me that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. But that’s not it. Instead, it’s more out of loyalty to the EverNote 2.2 that I know and love. Plus, to be honest, I don’t feel like wasting any more of my time constructively criticizing EN3b. I’ve done a lot of that on their support forum, and mostly to no avail. Hence, no discussions at all here.
On the forum today, there was a link to a great article: The New Coke Lesson: The Compulsion to Upgrade Can Produce a Marketing Disaster. Consider Vista and (Maybe) Evernote 3 by Gary North. Right away, I was struck by this quote:
But even monopolies tend to dissipate (except for Arm & Hammer Baking Soda). Here’s why: an unwillingness to listen to clients. “What do they know?”
They know how to shop for alternatives.
Gary makes some great points, especially about how hard it is for a new user to find anything out about the stable, fully-functional 2.2 version of EN, and about how bad the user manual is. (I’ve read it; it’s pretty bad. Plus, they haven’t even kept the manual up-to-date with the beta changes, which means it’s essentially useless now.)
Gary also suggests that EN’s marketing team is missing the ball, since the only way they’re going to make money is off the tablet PC version of EN, which they’re not advertising. I’m not saying he’s wrong, but I know from the forum that EN has an even bigger cash cow on its mind. There’s going to be a free version of the beta, which will limit you to some amount of online storage (the new EN3 paradigm is that all of your information lives in the ‘cloud’ and syncs to whatever machines you have connected). A premium version of EN will have, well, premium features, such as more storage space, and maybe better security. Unfortunately, they’re still throwing darts at the wall trying to figure out the best combination of storage space and cost. And it’s going to be a monthly subscription fee, so you know they’ll be milking this cow for as long as they can.
Another thing that is mentioned in the article is that EN isn’t really giving its current 2.2 users incentive to switch. This is true. In fact, some of the more vocal supporters of 2.2 have said that not only will they not switch to this crippled new version of EN, but they’re actively looking for alternatives.
So, what do users know? Well, we know how to shop 
And my recommendation to you? EverNote 2.2 is still the best software I’ve ever used for organizing miscellaneous snippets, web clippings, research notes, lists. etc. etc. If you want to check it out, skip the main Evernote page, and go straight to here. As for the new beta? Well, I think you can read between the lines.
Original post here: GTD Wannabe
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