Are you one of those millions of Mac users currently paying $69.99 for your Evernote Premium account? Or even $34.99 for Evernote Plus? Well, Microsoft has come out with an early Christmas present for you in the form of the OneNote Importer Tool that can bring everything from your Evernote account into your OneNote account on Mac PCs.
The best part is that once you retrieve the data, you can make it available for access on practically any mobile or desktop device that runs either Windows or OS X operating systems. What’s more, the free version can do nearly everything that the Evernote Premium subscription can do!
Last year Evernote increased its Premium pricing from $50 to the current $69.99, and people aren’t happy about it. In comes Microsoft to swoop down on these dissatisfied customers and take them away by offering a free tool like this one.
What’s the Catch?
There’s really no catch because the importer tool is free to use. However, you may need to upgrade your OneNote to a Office 365 Personal account to take advantages of all the other tools being offered. In my opinion, $69.99 is worth the money if you’re getting OneNote AND a bunch of other useful stuff as part of the package.
What’s more, you can use your existing Evernote tags to organize your content as it is imported into OneNote – no messy re-filing to contend with.
At its current price point Evernote is as expensive as an Office 365 Personal account, but for that same price you not only get OneNote, but also the entire suite of Office apps such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access and Publisher. Moreover, there’s 1 TB of free cloud storage on Microsoft Azure and 60 minutes of free calls on Skype to any mobile or landline.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft is hitting Evernote’s consumer base, by the way. Earlier this year the importer tool was launched for all Windows users. And now they’ve opened it up to Mac users who have OS X El Capitan (10.11 or higher) installed.
Why Go After Evernote Customers?
The real reason Microsoft is going after low-hanging fruit is that it is creating an ecosystem of users who can freely “shop” for Microsoft’s increasingly cloud-based suite of productivity and other tools. By running tools like Office 365 and Windows 10 a subscription service accessible via the cloud, Microsoft is slowly moving away from being a software licensor to becoming a Software-as-a-Service provider. See what they’re doing for enterprise customers with the Windows 10, for example.
So they’re building an entire ecosystem around their products, and the attack on Evernote is borne of a need to keep feeding that ecosystem with new users. If Evernote users switch to OneNote, that puts them in a position to take advantage of the $69.99 package for Office 365, which may lead them to other services like Yammer and so on.
That’s the new Microsoft, and that’s how it’s going to acquire new customers. By helping people switch, they’re inviting them into an ecosystem that has pretty much all the productivity tools that an individual or business will ever need. From there it may well lead to increased device sales in the Surface category of products.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s imperative of mobile first, cloud first seems to be shaping up nicely for the company. From losing revenues because of declining PC sales, Microsoft now has several new revenue drivers that can take it well into the next decade and beyond. Everything about Microsoft is now about going cloud and going mobile, and providing the devices to run these applications.
I’ll be watching Microsoft closely to track every significant move towards that end, and you’ll be the first to hear about it.
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