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 placehold...

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