Evernote

"Your second brain" – seriously, Evernote? Are we really doing this tired Silicon Valley metaphor again? The elephant mascot company that once dominated the note-taking space is now desperately hawking AI features like a late-night infomercial, promising to "supercharge your productivity" with the same breathless enthusiasm of someone trying to sell you cryptocurrency in 2022. After spending way too much time clicking through their rebrand, I'm left wondering if Evernote knows what year it is. The marketing copy reads like it was written by someone who just discovered the concept of "second brains" on Twitter and decided to make it their entire personality. This is a company that had the note-taking market locked up a decade ago, and now they're desperately trying to convince us they're still relevant by slapping AI stickers on everything.

The website itself feels like watching a mid-life crisis in real time. Every headline screams "LOOK AT US, WE'RE STILL COOL" with the desperation of a tech executive wearing Supreme to a board meeting. "Make the most of your ideas—and your time" sits right next to "Want to give AI a try?" as if artificial intelligence is some cute experimental feature rather than the obvious pivot of a company running out of steam. The design is clean enough, I'll give them that, but it's the kind of sterile, focus-grouped clean that makes you miss when software had personality. Everything is perfectly aligned and optimized for conversion, which somehow makes it feel less trustworthy, not more. It's like they hired the same consultants who told every other SaaS company to use the exact same shade of blue.

Here's what really gets me: they're still pushing the "capture everything" narrative in 2024 like we haven't learned that digital hoarding is a productivity killer, not enhancer. "Remember everything and tackle any project with your notes, tasks, and schedule all in one place" – this is exactly the kind of feature creep that turned Evernote from a simple, useful tool into a bloated mess that nobody could figure out how to use. I've watched this movie before with Evernote. They had one job – make note-taking better – and instead they kept adding features nobody asked for until the app became slower than my grandmother's dial-up connection. Now they're promising to solve all your productivity problems while simultaneously admitting they need AI to make their own product functional.

The "real-time editing" and collaboration features feel like they're chasing Notion's tail lights while pretending this was always the plan. "Boost teamwork with real-time editing, leave comments to stay in sync, and assign tasks to keep everything moving" – congratulations, you've just described every other productivity app launched in the past five years. There's nothing revolutionary here, just desperate feature parity with competitors who ate your lunch while you were busy trying to monetize people's grocery lists. The whole pitch reeks of a company that lost its way and is now throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. And don't even get me started on how they buried their pricing – classic move from a company that knows their value proposition is shakier than a San Francisco high-rise.

What frustrates me most about Evernote's current incarnation is the wasted potential. They had the trust, they had the user base, they had the market position – and they pissed it all away chasing trends instead of perfecting their core product. Now they're back with AI promises and "flexible structure" marketing speak, hoping we'll forget the years of performance issues and feature bloat. The website works fine, the messaging is coherent enough, and sure, maybe their latest version is actually good – but this feels like too little, too late from a company that should have been the Google of note-taking. Instead, they're just another productivity app in a sea of productivity apps, desperately trying to convince us they're our "second brain" when they couldn't even get the first brain right.