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Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

blog.evernote.com

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Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#71

Post by Ensorceled »

Maybe now they'll fix sync and iPhone editing? I've pretty much stopped using Evernote because the whole point was universally synced notes and todo lists but every time I would edit something on my iPhone I both had to deal with the formatting bugs in the iPhone editor AND the very high likelihood I'd end up with a "Conflicting Modifications" regardless of how many times I clicked sync.

As a paying customer it's been very frustrating to see "business" features like note sharing and chat consuming valuable resources while the reason I bought the product, managing notes and todo lists, becomes increasing unusable.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#72

Post by edanm »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #42
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fir[ing]" an employee suggests they did something wrong. These 47 people did nothing wrong outside of working on a product or products that are no longer relevant to Evernote.

No, it doesn't. Fired can mean termination w/out prejudice.

Well, it can, but there are several people here, as well as several Google results, which say that "fired" carries a much more negative connotation.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#74

Post by everly »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #41
on_ wrote: post #29

Evernote is a note taking app in 2015. While slack and hipchat are somewhat iconoclastic, they have network affects and boost productivity. Evernote is competing with apple notes, google docs, whatever microsoft has, every password keeping app, a notebook, a text editor and using a blog. This is something that will likely happen to dropbox and box. You provide storage. Simple math will provide you with the cost of st…

Microsoft has OneNote, which might be a good cautionary tale in this area. OneNote was once the king of note taking, like back in 2003, and it's still a great product. But Microsoft focused too much on the Business market, I think, dropping OneNote from the Office Home packages, and that kind of killed it outside of the corp world.

I was totally unaware of OneNote until it came with Windows 7 Enterprise at my first corporate job. I couldn't believe how great it was (at least on desktop), but I was too deep into Evernote by that point to make the switch.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#75

Post by sekasi »

I've been a stalwart supporter of Evernote for quite some time now. I've pushed through when feeling like the platform got slower and slower as time went by. I pushed through when it felt like their focus was scattered, like the core offering was being surpassed by other platforms.

Two months ago I pretty much decided 'ok you know what. This is it' after waiting for 25 seconds to get a note back that then turned out to be mysteriously 'missing'.

It happens, right. I get it. And I got it back with some support. But the focus wasn't there, and the platform got old.

Wind the clock back a year and a half (maybe two?) and Evernote was unstoppable compared to the competition.

Now? It's stale. Slow. Predictable and uninspiring.

While reading letters of layoffs is almost always a depressing thing, I sincerely hope that the 'focus' which they speak of is real. That everything, and I mean everything, gets dropped except making the core product as amazing as it once was.

If they do that, I'll come back in a heartbeat. I'll come back with dollar bills.

I got faith Evernote. Come back to the light.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#76

Post by JBiserkov »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #41
on_ wrote: post #29

Evernote is a note taking app in 2015. While slack and hipchat are somewhat iconoclastic, they have network affects and boost productivity. Evernote is competing with apple notes, google docs, whatever microsoft has, every password keeping app, a notebook, a text editor and using a blog. This is something that will likely happen to dropbox and box. You provide storage. Simple math will provide you with the cost of st…

Microsoft has OneNote, which might be a good cautionary tale in this area. OneNote was once the king of note taking, like back in 2003, and it's still a great product. But Microsoft focused too much on the Business market, I think, dropping OneNote from the Office Home packages, and that kind of killed it outside of the corp world.

How do you mean? According to Wikipedia OneNote was launched in 2003, and has been part of the Home and Student editions of Office 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#77

Post by douche »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #41
on_ wrote: post #29

Evernote is a note taking app in 2015. While slack and hipchat are somewhat iconoclastic, they have network affects and boost productivity. Evernote is competing with apple notes, google docs, whatever microsoft has, every password keeping app, a notebook, a text editor and using a blog. This is something that will likely happen to dropbox and box. You provide storage. Simple math will provide you with the cost of st…

Microsoft has OneNote, which might be a good cautionary tale in this area. OneNote was once the king of note taking, like back in 2003, and it's still a great product. But Microsoft focused too much on the Business market, I think, dropping OneNote from the Office Home packages, and that kind of killed it outside of the corp world.

I've only really known about OneNote since it came bundled with Windows 8/on the Surface RT I got at work.

It seems like a fairly good product, although I really only use it for bookmarking tabs that Chrome seems to lose when it crashes/updates itself and nukes the "recently closed tabs" list.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#78

Post by InclinedPlane »

radiorental wrote: post #68

From my perspective (as a UX'er). I'm seeing more and more projects & organisations need a 'vision' of what the product should be to help them focus product/feature efforts. There seems to be an underlying 'enabling' of superfluous dev effort due to the proliferation & ease of user of stacks/libraries/platforms.

More so, VC funding and the push to become highly valued (gotta win that unicorn lottery) drives scope and feature bloat. Every company has to grow, grow grow. Every product has to expand and scale up until it's everything to all people.

Compare and contrast this with, say, craigslist, which still only has a few dozen employees. There's nothing wrong with keeping a product tightly scoped and keeping a business highly efficient and consistently profitable year after year, decade after decade. Maybe you don't get to ride the unicorn train, but maybe instead you get to work on something that you own (or own a big part of) and can enjoy your job consistently.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#79

Post by onewaystreet »

tajano wrote: post #44
cyberpanther wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction, the next dead unicorn: Dropbox They are similar in that they haven't made anything note worthy in a while and their main product is really just a feature of bigger companies apps and services.

Another prediction: Twitter. 2k+ engineers on staff without notable improvements to the core user-facing product in a while. Declining signups, declining engagement. Nobody stepping into the permanent CEO role. I don't see how this ends well.

Twitter's core product is still useful for a lot of people, it's just never going to be Facebook. It will eventually be bought by someone, probably Google.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#80

Post by Stratoscope »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #42
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fir[ing]" an employee suggests they did something wrong. These 47 people did nothing wrong outside of working on a product or products that are no longer relevant to Evernote.

No, it doesn't. Fired can mean termination w/out prejudice.

I suppose it can mean that, but in practice, it doesn't. Being fired and being laid off are very different things in this year's English.

So different, in fact, that I have been "laid off" when the employer really had a mind to fire me for poor performance but wanted to avoid hurting my future prospects.

Here, don't take my word for it:

https://www.google.com/search?q=fired+laid+off

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