If I could find something that did image and PDF OCR as well as Evernote, I'd probably migrate, but for now, I'll risk the data loss for the ability to search everything so easily. I certainly welcome recommendations though.
Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
231–240 of 459 posts
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
OneNote is now completely free and available on iOS as well (where it has a full 5-star rating). As much I love Evernote, it's going to be an uphill battle for them. (And not to mention the handwriting experience and integration with the Surface Pen - which are killer features for students)
Nice thing is that the desktop app can sync/save copies locally and does private backups, but you can also save/sync and store data in OneDrive, private server, or corporate internet via a samaba share (Free version only syncs to OneDrive, but IIRC does local backup in desktop app).
Architecturally it's a very impressive product and makes some pretty creative uses of the windows folder hierarchy to get it's job done.
I think OneNote was built with a crashfirst mentality - It is very hard to lose data w/ it. Their QA team is damn impressive too, I've been a follower of theirs for a while.
My only complaint is the lack of true real-time sharing ala google docs's Operational Transform (they didn't exist when it was made), but it does come close. Opening a shared notebook in class and having everyone collaborate on the note was an awesome experience.
It's inking support blows everything out of the water IMHO. It also has a lot of the advanced automation features you can access by integrating OneTastic.
Only real issue I've ran into is that it gets to be a pain to print with as it has some wonky scaling features and the page layout feels like an after thought.
It is also hard to get groups of people to use it effectively because it is basically a WIKI and needs to have the same kind of discipline / habits to make it usable.
If they can do inking support with Operational Transforms, they may be able to have a replay feature without even trying - something that many teachers seem to really want out of the product.
My friend and I love the product so much we've been trying to make our own online version with inking support w/ paper.js share.js, github, and localstorage.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#233I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything. Support…
I sound like a cynic when I say this, but the root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application. If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you…
This is a great point. There's an analagous situation in finance: would you rather have a single mutual fund own all your investment money, or do you want a brokerage account with some active management? The latter is definitely more complicated but gives the user more control, accountability, visibility, etc. While it makes sense for a Whole Product to want to hide this complexity and liquidity from the user, any long-term user will very likely want it after they've learned to use the product.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#234what's evernote again? I keep hearing about it but never seen it or have used it.
Something that came pre-installed on my last phone and couldn't be removed, and obnoxiously kept updating itself and asking for more permissions. No idea what it does, that annoyed me too much to ever find out.
that explains it. I feel like a lot of these startup companies cater to SV because outside of SV people are completely unaware or unappreciative (doesn't see any disruption in note taking move along).
Makes me wonder how many SV unicorns will flop next year. My prediction is Twitter and Hoosuite.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed; Google Keep has become my preference for immediate note taking. I think a major factor in Evernote's long-term survival is the friction of switching to a competitor (in conjunction with getting a lot of early traction with power-users).
i don't trust them with my notes after google notebook went away.
Google notebook was amazing! But at the very least, they did export all notebook notes to Google docs, so it wasn't like they completely binned all user data.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#236The only thing I use Evernote for is for indexing research that I do for work. I got burned early with their tool for writing, but it was still compelling for that use case. The tagging & search is fast, their web clipper is best in class and annotation capability works great.
But there's a cost. I don't like having years of information stuck in an app that makes it very difficult to extract.
My guess is if the new corporate direction is to monetize/nickel&dime, I'll take on the lift to moving. I can get 90% of the functionality that I need in the native OS X filesystem with spotlight comments and little helper apps, and I have a work Mac now.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#237Evernote 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 love what OneNote can do, the ability to record meeting video or capture a whiteboard talk with a smart board is magical. But I can't use it day to day.
Managing notebooks, tabs and pages is a real pain. I end up with a sprawling OneNote notebook that gets lost in the sprawl of OneDrive/SharePoint.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#238For those looking for an Evernote-to-OneNote migration utility, see my comment in this thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10301284 --- it seems to work fine.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently lost nearly a days writing - but apparently they only do a back-up every 8 hours, and I was off by one (I don't write in Evernote anymore, lesson learned). They did try to placate with 3 months free (after being a paying customer for years), but I'm just amazed that with the ~$300M of VC they've raised, they still haven't caught up to the real-time sync of Google Docs of 8+ years ago. Hopefully their new f…
I made the switch to Simplenote, and I've had a great experience so far. The main "sacrifice" is that you can only store plain next. It was created by Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company.
I made the switch to Simplenote
I have a problem committing to a program/site that says:
it’s all completely free
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dropbox problem is that it was obviously better several years ago so its user acquisition was easy. Nowadays dropbox needs to convince user of other services that it is better. On paper though, dropbox provides less for more money - that's going to be difficult. I share your opinion - they are better. The reason I know is because I have been a client for years and they never let me down even in weird syncing scenario…
Dropbox is undeniably better. It gets synching right and this is so incredibly important. People should be rooting for Dropbox, not hoping for its demise. Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right.
Amen.
OneDrive for Business is a great example of screwed up sync. Whomever made the call to release that steaming pile should be flogged. Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client.
When the MS product guys were pretending that our network/workstation image was the reason that OneDrive sync broke, I took a laptop out of the box, put Windows 8 on it, streamed down Office ProPlus and signed in a dummy user with a small file tree. Then we wrote a script that created a text file and saved it to a directory every 3 hours. Than we left it. The client broke itself after 2-3 days with no user activity.
With Dropbox, I had a laptop in my basement that I forgot about for 3 years. I turned it on, signed into Dropbox, and it magically just worked. So sync issues. No conflicts.