Some Good News from Evernote

Casey Newton has an interview with Evernote CEO Chris O’Neill, who took over the company 10 months ago.

Reading through the article, three things stand out to me: I like his attitude; they don’t need to raise more money; and, they seem to realize Work Chat hasn’t been a success.

So let’s talk about business. Evernote invested significantly in a feature called Work Chat, which allows for collaboration around individual notes. But it doesn’t seem like the company has gotten much of a foothold. How will you tackle the business market? Should we expect the company will orient itself more toward collaboration uses?

No. It’s important to not try to be all things to all people. You have Slack, you have Hipchat. That’s a well-served market. Let’s just politely say, collaboration and chat is well served. So I don’t see it as, we need to try to do everything. If we do well with frictionless capture of ideas, and world-class search and retrieval, I think we can partner with a lot of other players.

I want to believe there’s still hope for Evernote.