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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

#351

Post by pjc50 »

davidjgraph wrote: post #279
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…

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…

Users no more expect vendors to lose their data than they expect banks to lose their money. I suspect we'll eventually end up with some sort of standards body making sure you do backups.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#352

Post by greyman »

I am also worried that Evernote didn't innovate in the recent years, but I still consider it a best notetaking application on Windows. (and I tried several others like ResophNotes, Onenote, etc). I can quickly add new note by clicking on tray icon or by global shortcut, filter notes by tag, and Search is also spontaneous.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#353

Post by veidr »

jansc wrote: post #328
akulbe wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use DEVONthink too for the same reason. The only thing DEVONthink lacks is cross-platform support. It's a pity that it's not available on Linux or Android.

To be fair, it lacks a lot more than that when compared to Evernote. Evernote is a bundle of great ideas, done horribly catastrophically badly.

1. Evernote has dual-language OCR of PDFs and images (and a few others crappy formats that normally shouldn't be used like .docx, .xlsx, etc). That's a great idea. DevonThink doesn't even have Japanese support (their licensed OCR only supports Western languages).

2. Uh... OK god dammit that is really the only feature that keeps me using Evernote's horrid apps. Shit.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#354

Post by xerophyte12932 »

lepht wrote: post #181
mrmondo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you submitted it as a feature request to their support? I get the feeling they just don't have enough people asking for it.

Markdown support has been a common feature request for years, with many feature requests in their forums as well as entire blog posts from fairly prominent bloggers – just try googling "Evernote markdown support". I've had the strong suspicion for a long time now that they simply aren't listening to these sorts of feature requests that don't tie into their enterprise/business focus – at least since about 2013.

Their official response on the matter is something like:

We do not support markdown but have created an API that lets third party developers provide markdown support.

One really good example is www.marxi.co

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#355

Post by wtbob »

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!)…

> 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.

It doesn't really secure users' data, since Google is able to read that data. Were it truly secure, it would all be encrypted with a high-entropy keys known only to the users.

People without backups could always choose to store their keys with Google, but people who want their data to actually be secure would be free not to.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#356

Post by baldfat »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #258
baldfat wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally have been using git more and more for my note taking. I use RStudio and RMarkdown for my notes and it has been great and easily spread to all my personal devices.

Hmm, that's an interesting solution. You could always combine this with a private github repo and get easy-to-browse note-taking. It does seem like having to manually sync would be annoying though, is it really better than solutions like GDocs?

I actually use a FREE Private repo on bitbucket.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#357

Post by zrail »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #258
baldfat wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally have been using git more and more for my note taking. I use RStudio and RMarkdown for my notes and it has been great and easily spread to all my personal devices.

Hmm, that's an interesting solution. You could always combine this with a private github repo and get easy-to-browse note-taking. It does seem like having to manually sync would be annoying though, is it really better than solutions like GDocs?

I use a combination of Sparkleshare, Emacs, Markdown, and an emacs mode named Deft to accomplish this. Deft autosaves my notes as I write them, and then Sparkleshare automatically syncs changes with the git server. It's pretty nifty.

https://www.petekeen.net/git-backed-personal-markdown-wiki (I added Deft later)

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#358

Post by puranjay »

lukefreiler wrote: post #196
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 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…

This is why I store all my important writing (mostly fiction, journal entries, etc.) locally, on an external HDD AND Dropbox.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#359

Post by veidr »

rodgerd wrote: post #203
lukefreiler wrote: post #196

Earlier 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'd have moved by now if I could find something that was both highly cross-platform (Mac/Win/iOS) and lighter (Markdown pretty please). I've compromised on OneNote, which isn't lightweight, but has become impressively cross-platform.

I might use OneNote if its search could find text in attachments. But it cannot; it only supports searching the actual text contained in the note itself.

Part of the Evernote value proposition is being able to find things again (although Evernote's search interface is abysmally bad, and offers no way to narrow your search so as not have a huge number of irrelevant matches).

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#360

Post by davidjgraph »

pjc50 wrote: post #351
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…

Users no more expect vendors to lose their data than they expect banks to lose their money. I suspect we'll eventually end up with some sort of standards body making sure you do backups.

I don't quite follow your point. We didn't lose their data, we never had it.
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