Evernote Announces Evernote Business With Company-Wide Sharing And Phone Support
Evernote CEO Phil Libin just announced a new product aimed at small- and medium-sized companies (or small- and medium-sized teams within large enterprises) — appropriately, it's called Evernote Business.
Context & Ripple Effects
Evernote arrives at this launch from a position of consumer scale rather than enterprise pedigree: CEO Phil Libin said in April 2012 the company was approaching 30 million users while batting away funding reports as premature. The year so far has been about widening the product surface — the Penultimate acquisition for handwriting, a separate Yinxiang Biji service for China, and Mac app updates like the Activity Stream notification center.
Evernote Business is the logical next step in that arc: the same note store, repackaged for small- and medium-sized companies and teams inside larger firms, with company-wide sharing and phone support attached. The pickup across TechCrunch, PandoDaily, PC Magazine, PC World and others shows how closely the productivity press is watching whether a consumer darling can sell to businesses.
First-order effects
- Small- and medium-sized companies, and teams within large enterprises, gain a supported version of Evernote with company-wide sharing and phone support — the two features IT buyers typically require before approving a tool.
- Evernote adds a second revenue line aimed at organizations, sitting on top of the individual-user base Libin cited at nearly 30 million in April 2012.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in note-taking and lightweight collaboration now face a competitor offering admin-grade sharing and support at the team level, pushing them to match business features or concede the SMB segment.
- Phone support changes the sales motion: Evernote can approach IT decision-makers directly rather than relying solely on bottom-up adoption by individual employees.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer productivity apps will keep converting free individual users into paid organizational accounts, with the enterprise tier becoming the monetization engine built on top of consumer-scale distribution.
- The move points toward note-taking tools evolving from personal archives into shared company knowledge bases, where sharing controls and support SLAs — not capture features — decide which vendor wins the workplace.
The trend: Consumer productivity apps are moving upmarket by wrapping their existing products in business-grade sharing and support, turning individual freemium users into paying companies.