It’s been 10 months since Evernote, which sells a note-taking app with more than 150 million registered users, brought in a Google executive to reboot its mission and refocus on the needs of business customers.
Part of that transition involves ditching features already handled by other apps. That push toward more simplicity is now taking shape. Exhibit A: Evernote’s new deal with Google, disclosed Thursday.
The partnership will make it simpler for Evernote users to share documents housed on the Google Drive cloud storage service. That content—drawings, images, graphics—will show up in context, not just as links.
“You can also search Drive from Evernote and any changes to files in Drive will sync automatically with your notes,” said Google group product manager Ramesh Nagarajan, in a blog post about the new relationship. “There’s even a handy icon in the Evernote toolbar to jump right into your Drive.”
Right now, the feature is available in a beta test for people that use Evernote with the Chrome web browser or on Android. But other platforms will be supported soon, according to the companies.
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Despite its travails over the past year, Evernote’s latest CEO Chris O’Neill said in an interview last week that the software company still signs up 100,000 people for its product daily. “That’s kind of crazy,” O’Neill told The Verge. “That’s kind of crazy. To this day, we don’t do paid marketing, we don’t have a salesforce. It’s organic.”
Deals of this nature are becoming far more common among cloud storage services companies. In just one recent example, Box announced an important strategic alliance with Adobe that will tie its file-sharing service into Adobe’s content management and electronic signature services.
Evernote could use a boost. The software company was one of the first startups to enter the “unicorn” club—privately held startups valued at more than $1 billion—back in 2012, but so far it has failed to capitalize on its early hype. Sometimes the little things, like deals with powerful partners, can mean a world of difference.