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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

#401

Post by neya »

icc97 wrote: post #296
neya wrote: 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

Hah! You got me :) I meant the opposite, thanks for pointing out!

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#402

Post by smrtinsert »

greyman wrote: post #367
everly wrote: post #66

Earlier 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).

What I find missing is a native Windows client. For me, "immediate" note taking means that I just hit ctrl-alt-N (or click Evernote icon in a tray), and I am immediately writing. In Google Keep, you basically need to visit a webpage, which is just not immediate. Or you use it only on mobile device?

Click to open a browser vs click to open a thick client... Is this really a problem?

I love Google Keep as is.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#403

Post by davidjgraph »

FilterSweep wrote: post #391
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…

> 99% of users don't care about privacy, architecture, etc. They want it to just work (TM). This is the sad Catch 22 we live in where privacy is jeopardized at the cost of ease of use Do you think there is any value in educating the customer further? Periodically (5mins) reminding the user with a small notification to save (and backup) their work? I agree it can become a UX Nightmare (e.g. MS Paperclipguy), but havin…

We autosave to their cloud storage. The case I'm talking about is where they manually delete files on their cloud storage and expect us to restore them because we're the app vendor that originally wrote the files.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#404

Post by saturdaysaint »

thanatropism wrote: post #398
jay_kyburz wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question. If you are just making plaintext notes how come you are not just using your text editor of choice? Vim, Emacs, Sublime, Atom etc etc

This is why all my App Store purchases of late have been text editors with Markdown and Dropbox support. Seriously: I have three text editors in the lower four icons of my iPad (four if the ssh client counts): one to have the important work thing open (Editorial), another with my personal note folder (1Write) and yet another for just typing text quickly (iA Writer), jotting quick lists, etc. The "office girlfriend" w…

I love Dropbox, but is it a platform for an investment-worthy business? Anecdotally, I know a lot of people that have a free account that's completely full and have no intention of paying $99 a year and would probably need to have their password re-emailed to them. I agree that there are potential (and actual) great apps, but this kind of onboarding experience restricts the audience greatly.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#405

Post by rwallace »

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.

This is exactly the right solution, and credit to Google for providing it.

> 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!).

I'm surprised you say that; it doesn't seem to me that 'dump this user's dataset to JSON/XML/whatever' should be very hard to do. Admittedly I've never worked on anything at Google scale. What am I missing?

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#406

Post by michaelt »

volaski wrote: post #228
tajen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> took a bunch of VC money Notes-taking apps have the competition of . There isn't much left to do for a notes-taking app: Everything else is bells and whistles. Responsibilities should be called here. Dropbox, Evernote, Slack and GitHub are all 4 hosting a massive free service, highly replaceable with cheap alternatives, with low switching costs. I sincerely hope the VCs who invest in those companies have another pl…

Can't take you seriously when you say Github is highly replaceable. Try and go hosting your open source project on some obscure hosted code repository, let me know when you get lots of contributors.

Oh, the free part of Github isn't easily replaceable. It's great for hosting open source projects.

But the private repos and the on-site offering - the things people pay for? Fair bit of competition there.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#407

Post by TurboHaskal »

jansc wrote: post #329
TurboHaskal wrote: post #282

I used to be a customer for a while. Then went with org-mode + git and never looked back.

Interesting. I used both Evernote and DEVONthink on OS X before. Now, I'm storing all my notes in plain text org-files on my Dropbox - but without version control. Do you share your git-repos via Dropbox or somethink like that? Or do you have a git server somewhere else?

I simply use a private Bitbucket repo and my commits are mere lazy timestamps. Nothing fancy.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#408

Post by gglitch »

everly wrote: post #66
austenallred wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be a huge plus if it didn't take 5 seconds to load every time I opened the app. Not sure how a company with so many competitors can survive long-term with its product in such a state.

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 recently switched from Android to iOS, and I deeply miss Keep.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#409

Post by Agustus »

tajano wrote: post #44
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.

Another prediction: Twitter. 2k+ engineers on staff without notable improvements to the core user-facing product in a while. Declining signups, declining engagement. Nobody stepping into the permanent CEO role. I don't see how this ends well.

Twitter is expanding its product offerings with Periscope and as of today's press releases is looking to expand past 140 characters.[1]

The curiosity is what becomes of the 2,000 engineers on staff. What is the break down in terms of their roles within the company, i.e. back-end, development, user-experience. When does the twitter back-end become a mature platform and you can start to wean down the number of engineers.

As an aside, I would love an app or system that will trace the origin of a story within the web eco-system. One comment from Re/Code is recounted / repackaged across the entire system.

Also, I was trying to find the original Periscope iterative development post through Google and Bing, no luck thanks to the two sites now integrating news into their search results.

1. http://recode.net/2015/09/29/twitter-plans-to-go-beyond-its-...

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#410

Post by BinaryIdiot »

porker wrote: post #304
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think OneNote is a superior product to Evernote, its organization abilities leaves much to be desired. For instance once you get more than like 10-15 (depending on resolution) pages within a second you now have to scroll and its a tiny list. More than, say, 2 sections on mobile means horizontal scrolling. It's all awkward and cumbersome. But I have yet to find another product that is better than Evernote and…

Ah whereas I find organisation in Evernote not to work. The tagging feature (on Windows at least) is buggy, and I often end up with half-word tags; they can also be 'lost' before the note syncs. I have notebooks full of disorganised information which I can't find -- this is what I view as Evernote's biggest weakness.

Fair enough; when I used Evernote I subscribed to the "tag everything" way of organizing stuff which worked fairly okay but yeah the interface even on Mac OS X is very buggy. I couldn't consistently create nested tags and tag nesting is a UI only feature; there is no actual hierarchy that can be searched for which is immensely disappointing.
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