Microsoft has OneNote, which might be a good cautionary tale in this area. OneNote was once the king of note taking, like back in 2003, and it's still a great product. But Microsoft focused too much on the Business market, I think, dropping OneNote from the Office Home packages, and that kind of killed it outside of the corp world.

OneNote is now completely free and available on iOS as well (where it has a full 5-star rating). As much I love Evernote, it's going to be an uphill battle for them. (And not to mention the handwriting experience and integration with the Surface Pen - which are killer features for students)

Nice thing is that the desktop app can sync/save copies locally and does private backups, but you can also save/sync and store data in OneDrive, private server, or corporate internet via a samaba share (Free version only syncs to OneDrive, but IIRC does local backup in desktop app).

Architecturally it's a very impressive product and makes some pretty creative uses of the windows folder hierarchy to get it's job done.

I think OneNote was built with a crashfirst mentality - It is very hard to lose data w/ it. Their QA team is damn impressive too, I've been a follower of theirs for a while.

My only complaint is the lack of true real-time sharing ala google docs's Operational Transform (they didn't exist when it was made), but it does come close. Opening a shared notebook in class and having everyone collaborate on the note was an awesome experience.

It's inking support blows everything out of the water IMHO. It also has a lot of the advanced automation features you can access by integrating OneTastic.

Only real issue I've ran into is that it gets to be a pain to print with as it has some wonky scaling features and the page layout feels like an after thought.

It is also hard to get groups of people to use it effectively because it is basically a WIKI and needs to have the same kind of discipline / habits to make it usable.

If they can do inking support with Operational Transforms, they may be able to have a replay feature without even trying - something that many teachers seem to really want out of the product.

My friend and I love the product so much we've been trying to make our own online version with inking support w/ paper.js share.js, github, and localstorage.

What is inking support?

It has really good pen/stylus support. It has completely replaced handwritten notes for me.

However, although it's amazing compared to a pen and paper it's still incredibly frustrating to work with.

* It can't handle large amounts of handwriting without igniting relatively powerful computers

* It crashes constantly when trying to balance pen input with palm rejection

* Syncing doesn't really work with non-trivial merging and doesn't handle sync errors nor errors in general well -- all of these usually end up with handwriting layered on top of itself

* Syncing is basically out of your control, you can't do partial syncs when you really need a section/page fast, and large notebooks with handwriting can take hours to sync completely. I've basically resigned to splitting my notes into many smaller notebooks.

* Handwriting on the "Desktop" version is a complete joke and so you're constantly switching between the that and the app to get good handwriting and more features.

So it's great, until it doesn't work then it's a nightmare.

OneNote works fairly well on Windows. The main issue I have with it is usability. Performance on Macs and iOS is fairly terrible though, from syncing lag, to input lag, (on an iPhone 6) to long load times.

I used to love OneNote's writing experience - but it sucked hard at syncing data between devices. That was what Evernote absolutely nailed from the get go. They synced data seamlessly before anyone else, and ultimately that ended up being more important to me than the UX. Now, in 2015, I feel like Evernote has scratched the UX itch enough for me that I have no reason to go back to OneNote for the forseeable future. Penultimate provides a decent UX for writing even if not as sophisticated as OneNote, Scannable is brilliant for pulling things in via the camera, and the core note-taking app is perfectly adequate, IMO.

And Android.

I was totally unaware of OneNote until it came with Windows 7 Enterprise at my first corporate job. I couldn't believe how great it was (at least on desktop), but I was too deep into Evernote by that point to make the switch.

I've only really known about OneNote since it came bundled with Windows 8/on the Surface RT I got at work.

It seems like a fairly good product, although I really only use it for bookmarking tabs that Chrome seems to lose when it crashes/updates itself and nukes the "recently closed tabs" list.

Isn't OneNote still popular in education, like students taking notes in class?

It is, and is integrated well with the Surface and the Surface pen. Works great for taking handwritten (or typed) notes and having it sync to my phone/desktop immediately. I use it often to take notes at meetings then I am able to send all the notes/diagrams to others in pdf form when I get back to my workstation.

Big fan of OneNote.

? OneNote has always been in the Office Home & Students version, hasn't it? It's also part of Office 365.

I think they shifted it to a Pro Plus-only feature in Office 2007 or 2010. I could be wrong though.

Edit: Vs. Office Standard. I have no insight into Home or Education versions.

I love what OneNote can do, the ability to record meeting video or capture a whiteboard talk with a smart board is magical. But I can't use it day to day.

Managing notebooks, tabs and pages is a real pain. I end up with a sprawling OneNote notebook that gets lost in the sprawl of OneDrive/SharePoint.

same here, ive been using it for two years now and it so tedious to organise stuff on the metro app that i just dont bother, so everything is a mess atm

How do you mean? According to Wikipedia OneNote was launched in 2003, and has been part of the Home and Student editions of Office 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016.

OneNote is a great MS product that they've totally failed to market. My wife uses it extensively; the drawing capture features integrate nicely with the Surface.

My working theory regarding OneNote is that it is a peculiarity of Australians. The only people I know that use it are Australian so maybe they have it on the national curriculum there instead of something like 'spelling'.

I think that a single-purpose app or service can survive in a world full of multi-featured competitors, but it needs to be insanely good at what it does in order to do so. Evernote is not insanely good at notetaking, and therein lies the problem.

Agreed, but it is insanely better than anything else I've ever tried.

(I haven't tried that many things, but really I don't know of any decent competitor that runs well on multiple platforms, and does the basic things I need - which is text notes, other file types, and ability to tag and put into a notebook. And on a native app).

Your thesis is correct (single purpose app can survive in a world full of multi-featured competitors by being insanely good at one thing). But I disagree with your interpretation. Evernote is THE multi-featured competitor in notetaking arena. It does too many things, each of them in mediocre manner. Then comes all the "single-purpose apps that are insanely good at one thing only" which disrupt Evernote. Think of Instapaper (Saving webpages), Simplenote (Text syncing), All kinds of TODO apps, they all are good at one thing and do it well. That's why Evernote is not doing well.

MEGA might not be safe anymore. Kim Dotcom doesn't work there, there was a hostile takeover.

Dropbox must have many more corp customers than evernote, no?

I am sure. However, like evernote the difficult problem they solved several years ago is no longer difficult, but quite easy and become much more cheap. Couple that with security and privacy risks and the value proposition changes quickly.

Maybe they are gearing up for a google merger or something. They are doing their mailbox app which looks cool and integrates storage and syncing. However, once again

1. Why would I use a mail client that only interfaces with gmail and outlook?

2. What is the point of the sync, this is default by most mail providers and clients?

3. Why would I want mail storage? I actually don't know what my mailbox limit is, but I certainly would not want to have the amount of .txt documents that could fill that up. Also, this is basic functionality. You can't pull me on your platform, google has the users you want and are better positioned, I still don't understand how you make money as a company.

When did file sync become easy? I agree it's become commonplace with Google Drive and iCloud bringing respectable implementations to market, but I think it's still far from easy.

It's easy from a consumer point of view in the sense that it's readily available and easy to set up. The fact that it is still technically difficult to set up from scratch doesn't matter to consumers (or businesses) when there are multiple providers that hide that complexity for the end user. Hence Dropbox no longer has a competitive advantage from having produced a solid solution to a difficult problem.

Right, except the stories of data loss are an order of magnitude more common with Google Drive and iCloud compared to Dropbox, so even though at the surface level it may be a classic market for lemons, I still think Dropbox has a competitive advantage based on their reputation.