Microsoft provided something that didn't exist at its time (the most user friendly productivity software on the largest OS platform). If you provide something that's immediately useful and there's not really much of an alternative, people will use it no matter how complex it is. Coming back to Evernote, it doesn't have a single competitive advantage and it doesn't own any platform. There are tons of simpler alternatives for each of its features. It's a different story.
How many meaningful competing products does Xbox have? You can count with one hand. Same goes for Azure. Now think about how much competition Evernote has. There are tons in each category. Heck I can even build my own note app in an hour using Dropbox, iCloud or any other cloud storage providers (which by the way are much more stable than Evernote) Lastly I don't know what you mean by CRM and SQL (since they're a category and not exactly a product) but basically all these enterprise products from MOS were successful because they already owned a successful platform--Windows. Evernote doesn't have any successful platform and its product had too much competition with little competitive advantage.
XBox came in when there were very few competition to PS. PS was the platform of choice (for game developers). Microsoft created an alternative platform (it is like someone else creating an alternative to Windows today).
Evernote had all the advantages when they launched, they over took Microsoft's OneNote in no time in terms of mindshare. Infact when Evernote launched there were hardly any cross device note taking app (other than Microsoft's).
Evernote was darling of investors, had the field wide open, but they had to dig their own grave by not paying attention to product management and engineering (the fundamentals).
