Secondly, it seems from your background that you are 18 and your self-identity is closely linked to programming 'apps' and the whole money-for-dotbubbleapp2.0 thang. I am happy for your (apparent?) success thus far, as you yourself spin it. However, I would suggest that you consider that perhaps you do not have enough perspective yet to understand that this whole thing is just a game... a very stupid game... and ultimately not necessarily producing anything at all that is meaningful or useful to humanity, the economy, the country, or your dog: despite big scary amounts of money being thrown around.
In answer to your question: I am serious. It appears to me that it is not untrue to say that nothing Evernote has done has actually been new or unique. All they've done is drawn a cloud around some stuff that existed before (I can hear the squeak of the whiteboard marker right now...), put some marketing dollars down and made some sexed-up UI's for a few device types. That's it.
Then got a bunch of money.
Of course, they probably wasted a lot more money doing it less efficiently ... and used a lot of stupid Silly-valley oldboy networks to get the cash ... and burned a lot of time. And maybe actually did produce something new along the way. But basically... nothing new. Skepticism is king.
TL;DR? That's sad because I can't them recommend that you try The Art of UNIX Programming or any tome on code generation. But I hope you do. Also, take a tip and don't aim for fame "One day I hope you won't need to look me up to find out who I am" (puh-lease!) ... we were all 18 once.
PS: there are some things called aspirations. I'm sorry I'm not jaded enough yet.
The UI/UX/API/mobile and desktop apps/backends, all of which you dispatch off without thinking, are all non-trivial to get right. The fact that evernote doesn't have too much competition right now should tell you something.
More than text files? Yes, there's some binary file support too. "Ooh"
OCR is not hard. They probably just use http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
The fact that they don't have 'competition' proves nothing. Maybe nobody wants their 'product' because it's not useful. As others have commented even here, who've actually tried to "get it" multiple times, it's really not useful for a lot of people - they just don't see the point.
Maybe the lack of people copying their "product" is because it's just marketing fluff around a solution to a problem that doesn't exist (really, very much, for most people, apparently).
If you produce resources or services of value, then the future is rosier because others will trade with you in exchange for access to those resources or services.
If you make some piece of software junk that's dismally easy to copy and do so based on speculative capital, particularly when it provides arguably zero unique value, then what you've done is wasted everyone's time... including that of your own workforce. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evernote#Similar_products_and_s...
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is rife in the US.
Back to reality: I cannot conceive of China suddenly sending squillions of RMB to the US because someone figured out how to Web2.0 a TODO text file. Hence, skepticism on real economic value.
It's true enough, but that doesn't mean that your underlying premise is valid.
A superior solution would be any version control client and regular files. I'm not intimately familiar with Evernote but I'd wager that there are at least ten major features of good version control systems that Evernote doesn't have. Features like decentralisation, transparency, open source, mature security model, mature fork and merge model, commit hooks, etc.
Failing that, even rsync would be a good solution for a single user. I'm sure it's probably more on-wire efficient than whatever system Evernote use.
J. Krishnamurti: "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."