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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

#271

Post by elevenfist »

Spivak wrote: post #261
billrobertson42 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is inking support?

It has really good pen/stylus support. It has completely replaced handwritten notes for me. However, although it's amazing compared to a pen and paper it's still incredibly frustrating to work with. * It can't handle large amounts of handwriting without igniting relatively powerful computers * It crashes constantly when trying to balance pen input with palm rejection * Syncing doesn't really work with non-trivial mer…

OneNote works fairly well on Windows. The main issue I have with it is usability. Performance on Macs and iOS is fairly terrible though, from syncing lag, to input lag, (on an iPhone 6) to long load times.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#272

Post by doug1001 »

nsrivast wrote: post #246
twhb wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At the moment, people are implicitly trading their personal data for services and convenience (communication, transportation, etc). Yet our data has value not just aggregated across millions of users and trained to sell ads; it has value to us as individuals: third party platforms can disappear, get hacked, act dishonestly, or change their business model. There have been advances in systems that reclaim or duplicate…

or is the problem just a poorly designed data model by Evernote? So for instance, i have had a github account since 2009, and i access both my personal repos and my repos that belong to my employer using the same accountName. When i joined my current employer, i no longer had access to my prior employer's repos on github, though my access to my own repos (both public and private) remained unchanged. And when they switched from github organizations to hosted github (more similar to the OP's situation) all of my repos in my personal github account remained intact and my access wasn't affected in any way

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#273

Post by slaxman »

jason_slack wrote: post #106

I 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…

Out of curiousity, What made you choose Evernote over Google Drive? Doesn't Google Drive offer the same features? I haven't used Evernote and use Google docs to store my notes instead.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#274

Post by bwohlergo »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #241
rokhayakebe wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always under the impression that nothing really gets deleted online.

In the short term you're absolutely correct. In the long term everything suffers from "data decay". It's just too hard to keep old files around forever. E.g. there were comments I made on Usenet many years ago. Google has previously attempted to preserve those, but they seem to be fading away into the ether. That's okay by me.

the files are mostly there... its just too troublesome for the companies to access the files for one user

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#275

Post by yitchelle »

symstym wrote: post #126

Long ago I got tired of Evernote's bugs and creep of extraneous features and switched to Workflowy [1] for the majority of my general (plaintext) note-taking. I love Workflowy and can't imagine life without it. [1] https://workflowy.com/

Just tried workflowy. I really love the way that they guide you through the demo, they are onboarding a potential user in the demo! What a great concept.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#276

Post by eevilspock »

doug1001 wrote: post #272
nsrivast wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the moment, people are implicitly trading their personal data for services and convenience (communication, transportation, etc). Yet our data has value not just aggregated across millions of users and trained to sell ads; it has value to us as individuals: third party platforms can disappear, get hacked, act dishonestly, or change their business model. There have been advances in systems that reclaim or duplicate…

or is the problem just a poorly designed data model by Evernote? So for instance, i have had a github account since 2009, and i access both my personal repos and my repos that belong to my employer using the same accountName. When i joined my current employer, i no longer had access to my prior employer's repos on github, though my access to my own repos (both public and private) remained unchanged. And when they swi…

Sure, GitHub is better designed, but it also follows the principle of data freedom espoused by twhb and nsrivast. That may have come naturally by virtue of Git, but they also provide an API with no restrictions that can be used to move other things like GitHub Issues.

@nsrivast: a movement is exactly what we need. EFF is great, but they have a lot of things on their plate, and are not always consumer friendly. I've been working on core ideas for a Users First movement, because the web, contrary to the ideal results of a free-market, has been putting users last. Much of that has to do with users being the product not the customer. Your ability to "organize & visualize information for efficient teaching & understanding" would be invaluable!

@twhb: you have no email address on your account. please contact me if you are interested in helping articulate such a movement.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#278

Post by yitchelle »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #22
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #10

I know that it is the common vernacular, but you didn't let them go, you fired them. Surely they would prefer to not go and continue to pay their mortgage. I'm sure it wasn't easy to fire them, but don't try and make the situation rosey. The folks who decided on the direction of the company decided wrong and now they have to fire the people who executed those decision. Edit: Would you all prefer the word "Terminated"…

"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.

I think the wording used by the new CEO shows his attitude to the company. Reading the announcement, he is very much focusing on making more money for Evernote. There are no details on how those 47 people will be assisted post Evernote. It reads like the CEO really fired them.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#279

Post by davidjgraph »

twhb wrote: post #212
jason_slack wrote: post #106

I 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…

I fully agree, but as a vendor that only implements bring-your-own-storage, I can tell you it's not much fun from the supplier standpoint. Our no 1 support request is something along the lines of:

"I've deleted my diagram, can you restore it for me?"

"No. We don't store your data, we never even see it"

"What a useless service, just get my data back or I want to speak to random escalation person"

99% of users don't care about privacy, architecture, etc. They want it to just work (TM). They want us to be able to undo their deletion, find their data when they forget where they moved it.

So it's users pressuring suppliers in the wrong direction, it's not all one way traffic.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#280

Post by sweetbacon »

wpietri wrote: post #202
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.

Personally, I don't want them to make anything noteworthy. I want them to make something subtle, unobtrusive, and as reliable as gravity. I've been using them 3 or 4 years now and as far as I'm concerned, they're my favorite vendor. Google and Amazon keep screwing with things because they have a complicated global-dominance ecosystem that they're trying to build. I don't trust them with my files. But Dropbox keeps do…

I hear ya. But how much $$ have they made from us to keep the servers running? Sometimes it feels like my data could vanish at any time... I've started looking into ownCloud and the like lately as I'm just getting tired of offloading critical storage to something that may prove transient.
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