It did fill a serious need though. Other people followed including Microsoft making their own product as well.

Microsoft OneNote was released in 2003, while Evernote was founded in 2007. There were changes Microsoft made to allow OneNote to better compete with Evernote, but they did not make the product itself in response to Evernote.

I moved from evernote to onenote earlier this year. It was easy to move all my stuff (i was never a heavy user) using the tool onenote provides for the purpose. I have no complaints. I moved because I felt guilty/insecure being a free user of evernote. Onenote doesn't give you the guilt trip and it's got that Microsoft permanence about it.

Evernote (the original offline app) was released in 2004:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041114033908/http://www.evernot...

Evernote came a decade or so after Microsoft's OneNote. Evernote did make Microsoft improve their product though. It seemed as Microsoft was improving OneNote, Evernote started to go backwards.

TIL

I had no idea OneNote even existed until well after Evernote, and I worked at a lot of places using Microsoft products.... strange.

OneNote still feels like Microsoft's best kept secret. It is a simple solution to the common problem of taking notes. I'm convinced one of my previous bosses got several promotions just because he used OneNote to keep track of notes.

Apparently onenote sucked at synochronisation at one point which didn't do its reputation much good Also they are replacing the windows app with one of those universal windows applications which involved a temporary loss of a lot of features. Coming late to onenote myself, neither of these have been problems for me.

In a technical support department where documentation is largely controlled / poorly controlled by a small group... I know of folks who have a lot of 'secret' one note documents that are quite popular inside the company ;)

Apparently it's real common amongst university students for holding their entire collection of notes.

Not sure why you'd say that. The entire time reading this article i'm thinking, OMG what tool will I migrate to now? It serves a real need, which is why I happened to pay for both the service and pay with all the time required to keep it tidy.

PS: Any suggestions on alternatives?

It wasn't the business that was the problem, it was the product. Eventually, Evernote became insane cluttered, to the point where it was preventing me from doing things. I wished they had markdown support in like 2009, they still don't have it.

"Too Many Features, plus it's missing My Feature"...

Ok, why has the product failed then?

What's unwise about $100 million in revenue?

The $1Bn+ valuation.

It's not that a note app can't be successful, but clearly not with SV style funding and expectations.

Except the parent didn't write "don't do SV style funding for a notetaking app". The parent said "building a business on a notetaking app is unwise" with no other caveats.