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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

#431

Post by brianclements »

ericax wrote: post #421
symstym wrote: post #126

Long ago I got tired of Evernote's bugs and creep of extraneous features and switched to Workflowy [1] for the majority of my general (plaintext) note-taking. I love Workflowy and can't imagine life without it. [1] https://workflowy.com/

We made something similar to Workflowy called Dynalist ( https://dynalist.io/ ), there's a live demo you can try at https://dynalist.io/demo (no signup required). We made this because Workflowy has a lot of things that we thought we could improve, and they're kinda slow in development, but that's another story.

Great addition to the workflowy style ecosystem. I will definitely keep an eye on this one. When you plan OPML import support?

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#432

Post by brianclements »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #263
symstym wrote: post #126

Long ago I got tired of Evernote's bugs and creep of extraneous features and switched to Workflowy [1] for the majority of my general (plaintext) note-taking. I love Workflowy and can't imagine life without it. [1] https://workflowy.com/

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

For me it was:

1. a similar interface across all platforms with similar features and behavior (android vs desktop text editing is a very different experience)

2. tagging/enhanced search

3. hyperlinks to other nodes and the Internet. This is incredibly powerful to me for nodes that are relevant in multiple contexts. You can put copy/paste the URL of any node into any other and viola, workflowy symlinks!

4. FOCUS. I have ~15k lines of notes in workfowy, but am still able to "zoom in" and focus on the content of just one note. That is super powerful for my productivity. A text editor with 16 spaces of indent and squished text to the right just does not do that for me. In fact, that will probably stress me out more.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#433

Post by dang »

caf wrote: post #156
dang wrote: post #2

Url changed from http://www.businessinsider.com/evernote-layoffs-2015-9 , which points to this.

That article includes some pertinent information that's not in the blog posting, though (which offices are closing, one of the products that's being discontinued).

I'm sorry I didn't see this sooner. We might have changed it back. It's often non-obvious what the right call is.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#434

Post by timrichard »

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've gone the other way (Keep to Evernote). I need a cross platform solution, and with any significant amount of data the Keep webapp is practically unusable on my iPad. If they had released a native iOS version, I probably wouldn't have switched.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#435

Post by desas »

mark-r wrote: post #209
lukefreiler wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they got rid of their Food app recently. I'd be so grateful if they ditched Chat (or at least gave options to remove it from all platforms) and accepted that even if we it for work, some of it use it in a personal capacity that does not benefit from social aspects at all.

I never understood the food app. I figured it was a case of the founder taking "dogfooding" a bit too literally.

I found it useful, the evernote browser exception let's you save recipes without the crap and the food app let's you quickly find them and it kept the screen on while you were cooking.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#436

Post by coldtea »

lemevi wrote: post #392
coldtea wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone else has screwed up synching and screwing up synching means lost files! Lost photos of loved ones! Lost ideas, lost important documents! Dropbox is worth the price because it gets this right. If they rely on Dropbox getting syncing right to not lose "important files, photos of loved ones, ideas and important documents" then they are doing it wrong. They should backup anyway, and only then trust Dropbox for…

You are not considering the implications of how synching works. How do you know you lost files? I back up with Time Machine, Time Machine runs every hour and creates a limited set of back ups I can go back to. Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daugh…

>You are not considering the implications of how synching works.

Actually it's because I'm considering it that I advocate this.

>How do you know you lost files?

You look for them and they can't be found. And keeping a tally and/or checksum per folder in your backup doesn't hurt either.

>Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daughter I took and the file is gone you tell me what backup I go to to restore that file.

In your case it's simple, you can just go to Time Machine, as it archives all versions of the files, changed and/or deleted or not.

>You have 1 year's worth of hourly backups? I don't.

Actually with Time Machine you sort of have.

But, more essentially, you don't need "1 year's worth of hourly backups?", unless you're doing something very important and create new such files multiple times per day (e.g. if you're a business and store customer data, or a new site and you have your news database).

For stuff like "archived projects", "family pictures" or "music collection" just take incremental backups of them, and set your backup program to never delete any files during sync, but just put them in a "deleted" folder.

For stuff that changes fast, like working documents, emails and such, take backups with Time Machine (which happen in "real time"). Every few months take a full backup.

Besides network backup, never backup in just one external disk (and test your backup disks from time to time), and don't keep them in one place.

That is, if that stuff is very important to you. Some people can lose most of it, as it's mainly them hoarding digital BS.

If you're a business, OTOH, backup is PART of what you should do anyway.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#437

Post by julianz »

xerophyte12932 wrote: post #384
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'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. I don't understand. EverNote has instant sync across devices. If you are using in web browser or PC client then its even real time. (Android one requires you to click "Done" before syncing apparently because it treats the whole note as one giant text area). I very frequently…

The Windows desktop client isn't real time sync at all, it's set to sync every X minutes (configurable) and there's a great big Sync button on the toolbar.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#438

Post by mars »

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…

after being a long time user of evernote i switched to moo.do it's not a good tool for writing articles, but rather a mix between note taking and a todo app. your data is stored on your google drive, so you can back it up as you like.

it's free too: http://www.moo.do

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#439

Post by ericax »

brianclements wrote: post #431
ericax wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We made something similar to Workflowy called Dynalist ( https://dynalist.io/ ), there's a live demo you can try at https://dynalist.io/demo (no signup required). We made this because Workflowy has a lot of things that we thought we could improve, and they're kinda slow in development, but that's another story.

Great addition to the workflowy style ecosystem. I will definitely keep an eye on this one. When you plan OPML import support?

It's planned! See our roadmap on Trello: https://trello.com/b/z0HxDPNo/dynalist-roadmap

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#440

Post by asuffield »

rwallace wrote: post #405
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!)…

> 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…

> What am I missing?

To pick a few things I can talk about - sufficient replication to not lose data, data security that actually works (small companies can't - and shouldn't - afford disk shredders and internal access audits), targeted obliteration of customer data on request (including getting it out of the backups without rendering the backups worthless), and making sure that your exported data dump which contains massive amounts of personal information is only ever released to the correct user.

Doing any one of these things in isolation is not all that hard, because you can trade off against the others (for example, it is dead easy to do a data dump if you don't care about data security). Doing all of them at the same time is a large, expensive development project that would sink any startup.

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