Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices • Hacker News Board

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#311

Post by noyesno » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 8:43 AM UTC

I'm a long time Evernote user (I think I got an email stating I was in the first 3k users) but I'm also seriously considering migrating away to something else. My company is moving to Office365 and with that I've been exposed to OneNote and it looks like a good alternative (though the lack of a Linux client is a big problem).

The other note-capture tool that I've used religiously is "The Brain"[0], it's great for bookmarking and visualizing relationships (I even use it as my address book for contacts), it handles notes, links to files and URLs and can be synced with Dropbox or via their own cloud service.

[0] http://www.thebrain.com/

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#312

Post by davidjgraph » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 9:01 AM UTC

asuffield wrote: post #306

davidjgraph wrote: post #279

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…

(Disclaimer: I work at Google, not speaking for the company, etc) We can do both. Google stores, backs up, secures, and generally ensures your data is safe, and you can click a button to download it all if you think you can do any of that better. This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!)…

Just for info, the last time we ran stats on which cloud storage our users pick it was:

Google Drive 53%

Dropbox 4%

OneDrive 1%

I don't think you're having a problem selling the idea :).

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#313

Post by apostrophedave » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 9:05 AM UTC

laurent123456 wrote: post #305

dexterdog wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like something that I can buy and host myself so that when the over-valued company decides to stop making it I can still use it. Then again, I'm probably not a target user base for somebody looking for the next big thing.

I thought many times about building this kind of self-hosting note taking app, but what's stopping me is that it's not very useful without all the mobile and desktop clients, and that's very hard to develop. That's probably the reason why there's currently no good open source solution for this.

tagSpaces does a fairly decent job of it. its only missing a few hundred features compared to evernote but its mainly just one guy making it for the last few years so its fairly impressive at the same time. hopefully more features will be added eventually like a proper tagging system and stuff like note links, better search etc.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#314

Post by akulbe » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 9:06 AM UTC

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…

This is reason #1 why I like DEVONthink for the Mac. It uses exactly this model. I'm sure equivalents exist on the other platforms, but I'm not all that familiar.

I have been an Evernote Premium user for a long time, and since the company seems to be having a rough time, I recently looked at getting all of my data out of Evernote. What a nightmare.

I loved Evernote. I loved the fact that Phil Libin said he wanted it to be a 100-year company. I don't know all the details, but the fact that he seems to have given up... what a letdown. I'm working on getting my data out. Once I'm done, I think I'm going to let my subscription lapse.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#315

Post by tlogan » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 9:10 AM UTC

The problem with Evernote is they lack vision. Or maybe focus. Not sure which one. I understand selling socks makes money but ...

I was under impression that Evernote will evolve into something like RealTime+Word+Powerpoint - but no :(

I think Evernote is done. They lost their mojo and there is no way to get it back :(

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#316

Post by apostrophedave » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 9:12 AM UTC

inthewoods wrote: post #224

A bit surprised no one has mentioned SimpleNote (www.simplenote.com) - a stripped down note taking service.

i dont know what the financial situation is with simplenote or how it works but after the whole springpad thing im not in any rush to get into bed with some service that might not be around in a few years.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#317

Post by risratorn » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 9:14 AM UTC

I've had a love/hate relationship with evernote since forever. The idea of storing everything in evernote really appeals to me (invoices, receipts, warranty, contracts, ...) but yet scares me too since there are wild stories of evernote just loosing stuff.

On the other hand for simple note taking evernote really sucks, it's too cluttered and it's editor is subpar.

A few years ago I was an avid springpad user before they shut down, but they suffered from the same issues: too bloated, not really good editor. But it worked beter for me than evernote.

To me it feels like evernote tries to solve 2 separate problems: taking simple and small notes, archiving and indexing important documents. Unfortunately it fails at both for me :(

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#318

Post by codecamper » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 9:17 AM UTC

I used Evernote for a few weeks & it lost a bunch of my work. I can't believe they are still around.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#319

Post by atmosx » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 9:35 AM UTC

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…

Yeap, it's a 1990s model. I had a discussion with a software salesman... I was explaining to him that, what is valuable is not the software it's the data I will have put in his software in 5 years from now and if I don't have raw access to this data, I don't want his software.

He didn't understand a word.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#320

Post by atmosx » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 9:37 AM UTC

davidjgraph wrote: post #312

asuffield wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Disclaimer: I work at Google, not speaking for the company, etc) We can do both. Google stores, backs up, secures, and generally ensures your data is safe, and you can click a button to download it all if you think you can do any of that better. This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!)…

Just for info, the last time we ran stats on which cloud storage our users pick it was: Google Drive 53% Dropbox 4% OneDrive 1% I don't think you're having a problem selling the idea :).

And where did you got that data from? Because where I live dropbox is far and ahead in user-base compared to Google Drive. That's the feeling I'm getting, mind you, I don't have any actual data... But even the apps I (2do, 1Passwd, etc.) use have support for Dropbox while none of them has support for GDrive.