'It's really the first demonstration of the kind of thing we can do with the new infrastructure,' he said, 'because you've never been able to take a slice of content that cuts across all your notes, touch the content inside the note and change inside the note.' That sounds simple enough - and again, has been the vision all along - but Small said it just wasn't possible before. Rather than build a separate app or consign to-do lists to its own corner of Evernote, it's a compilation of every task inside every note a user has, sorted by due date or the note they're in. Tasks pulls to-do items out of all of a user's notes, which Evernote has never been able to do before. And he acknowledged that the trade-offs would be painful, but that Evernote was working quickly on two things: bringing New Evernote up to feature parity with Old Evernote, and building new features that made clear why New Evernote was worth all the hassle. 'While we have made considerable progress in our new apps, rebuilding them from the ground up, the releases have not gone as smoothly as any of us would have liked,' he wrote in a blog post in December. Small said he understood the feedback, good and bad.

Evernote took the unusual route of continuing to offer its old app, even months after shipping the new one. Consistency and feature parity are well and good, Small said, but 'at the end of the day, none of that matters to an individual user who's like, 'I'm missing my widget, whatever my widget is.'' Plus, the new apps came with a litany of first-version bugs and issues that felt like a step back. They'd come to rely on some of those platform-specific features, didn't understand why Evernote would take away some of the most basic features it had offered for a decade and saw only the downside of upgrading to the new product.

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.

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