The short history is that Evernote spent the early part of the 2010s expanding its portfolio into products that didn't really serve its core offering such as Evernote Food and Evernote Hello as well as other distractions. They should have used that time (and money!) to set themselves up for the future and now they're continually playing catch up.
You can read about this era in detail here: https://nira.com/evernote-history/
As we come towards the third quarter of the 2010s, Evernote was being shaped up a bit in terms of non-core products being dropped, on-prem infrastructure being migrated to the cloud and so on but this wasn't without great pains as well.
Not to mention, a non-trivial number of staff appear to have left during that period too which creates a negative feedback loop where the upper tier of potential candidates may be dismissive of an employer like Evernote (if it looks questionable on your CV) which is arguably the type of talent you might need in a period like this where your competitors have true realtime collaborative elements that the market is expecting from you as well as table stakes.
Now after this period, and this is just from my own observations so I don't have any particular stories to link, Ian Small tool over as CEO with a personal focus on continuing to modernise Evernote.
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4I5cq2DfrSpehLO_71NC...
I can't say how that has been received but I have a lot of respect for the "Behind the Scenes" series that occurred, showing Evernote's technical investments such as:
* Sharding their databases
* Standardising feature sets across mobile. Android might have had features for years that aren't on iOS and vice versa
* Standardising their applications hence the move to Electron. In the context of them needing to move faster, it makes sense to focus on one codebase instead of five, regardless of how you might feel about Electron itself.
While I don't know that Evernote can ever catch up, I have to say I have a lot of kudos for the risk that Ian took in showing us what they're struggling with.
That said, I don't use Evernote so I can't exactly say I feel the pain of their customer base but as far as content that might attract new talent, I think transparency like that is pretty much the gold standard next to having a technical blog and so on.