Evernote as a lifestyle service

Posted by WSP
Apr 18, 2014 at 05:31 PM

Last evening I stumbled on an interesting interview with David Engberg, the CTO of Evernote:

http://mixergy.com/dave-engberg-evernote-interview/

What I found especially fascinating was his description of the transition from the old Windows Evernote to the multiplatform software so familiar to us all now. I was caught in the middle of that awkward transition at the time, and it’s reassuring to learn that we early users were not being paranoid after all: Phil Libin & Co. really did not see us as their target demographic and were eager to become a “lifestyle service” rather than a “productivity” app. The irony of it is that the Evernote corporation now talks endlessly about its productivity potential and even has a business version.

Here’s the passage from the interview that caught my eye:

“We had a number of people that we had worked with before and that we brought together pretty quickly to build a team. And there was an existing company in the Bay area and in Moscow called Evernote that had been doing a note taking application for Windows as a Windows kind of a shareware application. That was really advanced for its time. It was much better than Microsoft OneNote, let’s say, and it had a lot of accolades.

“But fundamentally it was targeting the sort of people that would go out of their way to install Windows productivity software. And what Phil had a vision for was a service that would make it more of a lifestyle service that would transcend the productivity niche and make it something that could have more of, more the profile of an internet service that would grow like an internet service not like a Windows application.”