Google has announced a new product called “Keep” which does some of the things Evernote does. Guess what? I don’t care, and I will not be using “Keep.” Even though I haven’t tried it, I have already spotted some key differences between “Keep” and Evernote.
- The Google Keep app will not run on my Android 2.2 device (requires 4.0+). Evernote runs just fine on all of my Android devices.
- To Evernote, I am a customer. To Google, I am a product.
- I expect Evernote to be around for a long time. Google will yank any product that doesn’t fit their corporate agenda, and will lie about the reason, just like they did with Google Reader.
Oh, yes, Google lied about why it killed Reader. Google claimed that the reason for killing Reader was that usage had declined. In reality, GR usage growth had slowed a bit after previous attempts to cripple it (by removing some social features). At the time Google announced that it would pull the plug on July 1st, Reader had an estimated 450,000,000 users, or about 40% more users than Google+. Apparently, despite moving the social features to G+, G+ still lagged behind GR in users, and I’ll bet that G+ is the personal pet project of some senior Google executive. Although I have a Google+ account, I consider it to be the solution for which there is no problem, and I have come to consider the constant “reminders” I get of its presence to be an annoyance.
Come to think of it, it’s well past time for me to pull the plug on my Google+ account.
I’m even a bit queasy about the fact that I have a phone that runs Google’s Android, and that I have used Gmail to the extent that it is proving to be difficult to get off of it. I am at least doing a regular download of all Gmail to my own system.
…and for my Android devices, I can get CyanogenMod. I’m going to be checking that out.