When Evernote launched the first version of its new system in late 2020, it felt like something of a rebirth. The codebase got smaller, the tech debt started to disappear and after two years of not shipping much, the company started to be able to ship much faster. Instead of five teams building five apps for five platforms, Evernote became a single thing, accessible everywhere.

Soon after he joined the company in 2018, Small and Evernote shifted their entire focus to consolidating the app.

That process has been neither short nor simple. 'We spent two years rebuilding the clients, rebuilding the infrastructure, redesigning how Evernote worked on the inside, so that we could for the first time ship Tasks.' That it finally happened, said CEO Ian Small, is proof that the massive overhaul he and his team started almost two years ago was actually worth it.

Not until this month, anyway, when the company finally rolled out an early version of Evernote Tasks. And yet, Evernote never managed to ship the thing.

Evernote hacked 2017