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Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

blog.evernote.com

291–300 of 459 posts

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#291
IMHO Evernote is feature complete. It would be great if the company for a while switched focus from growth to support and just collected revenue. However who knows maybe revenue is not their goal and they just wait to be bought by Facebook.

Btw does anyone remember this article? https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/dialed/evernotes-quest-t... Have they changed their mind yet?

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> So it's users pressuring suppliers So may be managing data by product supplier is NOT the wrong direction?

It's about expectations. Users expect supplier to store and manage their data. If bring-your-own-storage became mainstream, users would know that it's them that manage their data and wouldn't have these expectations on the supplier.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#293
post #107

I've founded a startup that wants to tackle the digital notebook and save-for-later problem, for any content - not just web stuff. What's your wish list for your ideal notebook?

Desktop and mobile clients for all major platforms (including Linux, which most note taking tools don't support), markdown editing, possibility to backup to a local drive, Android widgets.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#294
The software needs to become more expensive and companies like google need to die. I have nothing against open source if it is not a complete product. But opensource can hardly pay for itself or make you "rich".

"Stupid" companies taught people that software must be free and can by paid for itself by people's personal information.

Good software is expensive.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might just mean that they delete all backups when the account gets deleted for privacy reasons.

Depending on the backup tech, that can be kind of difficult. I can't run arbitrary SQL against the database backups I've got stored in tarsnap. Nor against tape, etc. For that matter, isn't the (or one) reason for having a backup so that errant deletes don't obliterate everything?

Deleting the encryption keys for that customer's data is an effective way, and arranging your key storage such that keys can be deleted from backups is more doable.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#296
post #264

The problem with Evernote is with the way they treat data. I found a really interesting guide hosted on Evernote[1] and I tried to download it. But no, I couldn't, because, they took the pains to block someone from downloading their notebooks and made my life so difficult in the end that I not only gave up on the conversion, but also stopped being their customer. I couldn't even print the damn thing! Ironically, they…

> I refuse to stop paying

I'm not sure you meant that

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am interested.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#298
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping they're dropping the idea of chat. Spending time on that really never made much sense me when their core product is so strong but badly needs some features to better align with modern tech trends such as improved plain text and markdown support.

> ... markdown support Yes, 1000 times yes! I so wish I could author in Evernote using markdown. Getting any sort of rich text done in a note is extremely cumbersome in Evernote, lists for instance.

I will guiltily admit that Ctrl+Shift+U is hard coded into my finger DNA - I use Evernote for every meeting, every discussion we have, and quickly creating lists (or getting out of list mode) is actually one thing I like about evernote.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#299

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 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…

Somebody here at HN suggested using Zim wiki a while ago http://zim-wiki.org/

I've been using it ever since. It stores data in plain text files (dokuwiki markup) and in addition the folder structure is mirrored in the note hierarchy. Zim is open, cross-platform, can include Latex-formula, and is extendable with plugins written in Python. I really also like that it is a proper desktop application instead of some webapp that changes UX every now and then, usually to worse, and that is dependent on network connection. After learning the keyboard shortcuts it is really a pleasure to use. Five stars * * * * *

I keep my Zim notebooks (separate NB's for Work and Personal things) in Dropbox for easy syncing between two desktops. Other Win7 and other Ubuntu.

edit: Added mention to Latex, as it might be of interest in this crowd.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#300
Hopefully we will now see some competition in this space, rather than "Evernote" being the answer to "Why aren't you launching?". Though given their finances, I suspect not...

https://transpose.com is an interesting start, but needs a big cash injection to make it better - and suffers from data lock-in again.

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