Evernot? The Problem with Cloud Services (Premium)

Evernote’s impending failure raises serious questions that go far beyond which note-taking service you use. There’s a broader debate to be had about how you choose the services you use and why.

This all ties back to an interaction I had that changed the way I think about these things.

I remember the moment clearly, though I’m a bit soft on the details. I’m further embarrassed to admit that I don’t remember who put this idea into my head. It happened on Twitter, which is normally a net negative for me from an interaction perspective—people are terrible, including me—so it stands out for that reason as well. But every once in a while, you’re exposed to an idea that is so profound that it impacts your thinking forever. And that’s what happened.

I was engaged in a debate, or a conversation, about … some cloud service. Let’s say it was about Groove (and Groove Music Pass), which like so many Microsoft products and services that were later abandoned, was actually quite excellent in its time. Someone on Twitter—again, sorry—told me that he would never trust Microsoft, or any other big and diversified company, with a music service. Instead, he preferred to rely on a dedicated service, let’s say Spotify, because that company was only focused on that one thing. The idea was that Microsoft would drop Groove like a bad habit after a certain amount of time—and lack of success—because it simply wasn’t central to that company’s strategy.

To that point, I would have argued that Microsoft—or Google, or Amazon, or whatever—was a safe bet. That this gigantic corporation was so desperate to reach consumers that it would keep Groove as part of its product portfolio if only because it was so interconnected with its other consumer products and was a piece of an overall strategy and didn’t really need to succeed on its own.

But this guy’s reasoning was interesting to me. No, not just interesting. It … made sense. A company like Spotify would try much harder to make its service better because its very existence relied on it doing so. If Microsoft didn’t improve Groove at all for 12 months, who would even notice? If Spotify acted like that, it would cease to exist.

Since then, I’ve undergone an ongoing series of internal debates about the services I use. For example, it’s possible that my move to Dropbox three years ago—I don’t remember the timing of the Twitter conversation—was influenced by this. Dropbox, after all, pretty much just does storage. (OK, it has added some storage-adjacent services over time, but this was three years ago.)

That I’ve since returned to OneDrive—I only use Dropbox now for the Windows 10 Field Guide, and only because I have to—is perhaps illustrative of how I make decisions about this type of thing.

At the time of my Dropbox transition, OneDrive was in decline. It was still much less expensive than Dropbox, but OneDrive was slow and unreliable, a mess. Microsoft had killed the placeholders feature that users loved so much. In that scenario, in that moment of time, moving to Dropbox made sense. At least to me.

But things changed, as they often do. Over time, Microsoft improved OneDrive. The performance got much better. The sync issues disappeared. Even placeholders made a comeback with the superior Files on Demand functionality. And so I’m back on OneDrive, and I have no regrets.

I do, of course, have concerns. Today, you can upgrade to 1 TB of OneDrive storage, but only by paying for Office 365 Personal or Home. With the exception of a few special deals, you can’t upgrade beyond 1 TB.

Google, meanwhile, is now offering a Google One service that offers the ability to scale far past 1 TB. You just pay for the amount of storage you want. And… here I am again. Questioning the service I’ve chosen and wondering whether I should move to Google for storage.

(That I’m also using Google for storage is sort of beside the point. Today, I use it only for my personal photos.)

And the debate today is very different than it was three years ago. Today, OneDrive works fine. But I can’t scale past 1 TB. Google One probably works fine, too. And I can scale past 1 TB. So my mind turns to a related and perhaps central question: Which of these two companies is more likely to continue serving a consumer user base x number of years from now?

If you’re thinking clearly and are a Microsoft fan/user, the answer should make you a bit uncomfortable. That is, I think the answer has to be Google, and not Microsoft.

No, I’m not switching today or anytime soon. And I may never need to switch: Microsoft could very easily offer a Google One-like ability to go past 1 TB someday, perhaps someday soon. But it’s healthy, I think, to debate this kind of thing internally. And maybe hash it over with others to get a fresh perspective.

Regarding Evernote specifically, note-taking may or may not be important to you. But it’s certainly not mission-critical like the memories you have stored in photos. In this way, it more closely resembles my Groove example than my OneDrive example. I don’t feel that note-taking is particularly “sticky,” and that it would be relatively easy to export your notes from Evernote and move them elsewhere. And in the meantime, you can begin experimenting with alternatives—perhaps OneNote or Google Keep—and see what really happens with Evernote. It may end up being fine.

But it’s probably healthy to regularly evaluate which products and services you use and why. This is something I do implicitly all the time, but maybe it needs to be a spring cleaning-type event, something that happens annually or even more frequently. And it should include a wide swath of services, from email (think: Brad and his Newton mail issues) to music to cord-cutting services and much more.

Just be sure that this question around using what are essentially mom-and-pop firms or tech giants is part of the part of your own internal debate. I’m not sure I have an answer as to which makes more sense—arguably, it will be service-specific—but I do know that a decision that makes sense today might not in tomorrow, or in a month, or in a year. The key here is to keep questioning what you use. And to always use whatever products and services make the most sense for you.

I know, that sounds obvious. But it’s easy to just start using a thing and never question it again. When you do that, you get caught in the “it’s good enough for my needs” trap that dogged Windows phone users for far too long. You’ll never know whether something else is better if you stop looking. And you should always have a plan for moving along should a product or service you rely on disappear. It’s just common sense.