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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

#411

Post by Semiapies »

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've been using org-mode and git myself. I've used the bundle command to back up repositories in Dropbox, but for things I want to use on multiple computers, I set up an account on BitBucket and just push and pull my changes.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#412

Post by uniformlyrandom »

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…

And this is why iTunes is a much better software than iPhoto.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#413

Post by TeMPOraL »

atmosx wrote: post #319
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…

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.

Oh he most certainly did. Companies don't want to give you data for exactly that reason - if they can convince you to start using their software, you'll quicky be stuck with them.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#414

Post by tedmiston »

cpach wrote: post #331
tedmiston wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd be great. I'm using tags as a poor man's hierarchy for now. I do this on Pinboard too. Ex. #travel #travel-nyc #travel-nyc-Brooklyn.

FYI, in Pinboard it's possible to combine tags for filtering, like this: https://pinboard.in/u:kr4d/t:chicken/t:soup/t:recipe/

I really like that feature in the web app. Do you use a mobile app that supports multi-tag filtering too?

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#415

Post by TeMPOraL »

FilterSweep wrote: post #390
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…

> is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application. Close, its a principle fundamental to modern cloud-based companies. Offer the cloud storage for free, for 0 privacy and the permission to read, copy, access, and sell your data to third parties

> Close, its a principle fundamental to modern butt-based companies.

> Offer my butt storage for free, for 0 privacy and the permission to read, copy, access, and sell your data to third parties

Moreover, data loss is not a possibility, it's pretty much a certainty, because it's backed straight in the business model. At some point investors need to get their money back, and what better way to do that than have the company acquired? It's such an effective way that a lot of people starting their companies do that hoping that they'll get bought by a big corp. That the product gets subsequently shut down doesn't seem to bother anyone (except the customers, who at this point really should know better than to do business with a startup unless they're prepared for the moment said startup shows them the middle finger and disappears).

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#416

Post by TeMPOraL »

asuffield wrote: post #309
tedunangst wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At least in the EU there is a regulatory obligation to design your backup system such that data can (eventually) be deleted if the user so requests. Fortunately there is no strict time limit on completing this process so a design that looks like "and after X months it will have aged out of our backups" appears to be considered reasonable. You are still responsible for making sure your backups are safely destroyed.

On the other hand some data needs to be kept for many years due to legal reason. I don't think it would be possible or even legal to have all your data deleted upon your request.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#417

Post by balladeer »

antiffan wrote: post #226
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 made the switch to Simplenote, and I've had a great experience so far. The main "sacrifice" is that you can only store plain next. It was created by Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company.

Simplenote is where I keep my plain text notes now (Notational Velocity on Mac and official app on Android). My local copy of notes reside in my Dropbox folder and my (pretty much) entire ~/ is backed up to CrashPlan cloud.

For notes or docs that need diagram etc I use Google Docs. Even my team uses the same (as part of the Google Apps suite).

What I love about Simplenote is that it does what it says - just plain text notes. No gimmicks, no extra load and bells and whistles.

But I have a feeling that they will shut it down soon. They had a paid tier and they removed it some time back. There has hardly been any update I guess and iirc they don't really update their Android app frequently either.

Do they encrypt the notes at client side before sending it their servers? I would love to use a self hosted app that has such a functional and minimal interface and clean sync feature.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#418

Post by TeMPOraL »

dalacv wrote: post #111
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.

"It's traveling to space. Give it time" - LCK

More often than it should. This is a huge problem with current companies and their products - they depend too much on the Internet connection, because a combination of lazy (or deadline-pressured) authors and executives trying to monetize absolutely anything.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#419

Post by JoeAltmaier »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #416
asuffield wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the EU there is a regulatory obligation to design your backup system such that data can (eventually) be deleted if the user so requests. Fortunately there is no strict time limit on completing this process so a design that looks like "and after X months it will have aged out of our backups" appears to be considered reasonable. You are still responsible for making sure your backups are safely destroyed.

On the other hand some data needs to be kept for many years due to legal reason. I don't think it would be possible or even legal to have all your data deleted upon your request.

In those cases, just get it back from the NSA! They have a copy of everything.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#420

Post by WaltPurvis »

Spooky23 wrote: post #236

The only thing I use Evernote for is for indexing research that I do for work. I got burned early with their tool for writing, but it was still compelling for that use case. The tagging & search is fast, their web clipper is best in class and annotation capability works great. But there's a cost. I don't like having years of information stuck in an app that makes it very difficult to extract. My guess is if the new c…

> I don't like having years of information stuck in an app that makes it very difficult to extract.

Why do you say it's difficult to extract? You can select one, several, or all of the notes in a notebook and export them in either HTML or XML format, with all metadata (tags, etc.) and embedded media included. That seems pretty good to me, and it's certainly easy. If you wanted something more sophisticated, Evernote on the Mac has exceptionally complete support for AppleScript, so you can code up whatever kind of fancy extraction you need.

I'm not asking to be argumentative; I've always considered Evernote's support for extracting data to be pretty darn good, and clearly superior to many competitive apps/services, so I'm curious to know what additional functionality you would require before you'd say it's not "very difficult" to extract your information.

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